Ocean Atlas

Artist, photographer, naturalist, and diver

Jason deCaires Taylor

introduced his record-breaking public sculpture to the crystal Bahamian waters in 2014. Entitled

Ocean Atlas,

the installation encourages coral colonization and deters tourists from endangered reefs.

Forged from sustainable, pH-neutral materials designed to kickstart local coral growth,

Ocean Atlas

is a monumental public sculpture submerged five meters beneath the sea, and an environmental gesture intended to portray the positive potential of human interaction with the natural world.

Located off the west coast of New Providence in Nassau,

Ocean Atlas

is Taylor’s contemporary take on the ancient Greek myth of Atlas—a Titan condemned to carry the heavens on his back for eternity. Rather,

Ocean Atlas,

commissioned by BREEF (Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation), is a young Bahamian girl “sustaining the ceiling of the ocean,” Taylor’s website

explains

, as “our oceans and coral reefs currently [face] collapse from numerous threats including overfishing, habitat loss, ocean acidification, global warming and water pollution…”

Taylor founded the world’s first underwater sculpture park in Grenada’s Molinere Bay in 2006. The project, entitled

Viccisitudes

, was inaugurated with 16 statues of local Grenadian women. The installation is now comprised of 75 sculptures—each depicting a real person—sprawling over 800 square meters.

Taylor has since designed two more submerged museums:

MUSA

(Museo Subacuático de Arte) in Cancun, billed on his website as “one of the largest and most ambitious underwater artificial art attractions in the world,” with over 500 permanent sculptures forged to scale; and

Museo Atlántico

, the first submerged contemporary art museum in the Atlantic Ocean, based off the coast of Lanzarote, Spain.