Ghost Nets

Ghost Nets is a site-specific video installation created for Sculpture by the Sea in 2010, where it was projected onto the natural rock formations of Tamarama Beach. The work visualises the unseen menace of industrial fishing debris—massive nets abandoned in the ocean, adrift like ghostly predators. To create the piece, McGrath filmed dozens of swimmers at night, each captured mid-sink, enveloped in netting. The slow, hypnotic descent of the human figures—part performance, part elegy—evokes both entrapment and surrender. Projected onto the organic contours of the shoreline, the figures appear suspended in a liminal space between air and water, presence and disappearance. The ocean here becomes a theatrical space: both vast stage and silent witness. The nets, like the ones haunting real reefs, serve as metaphors for human excess and ecological neglect. In its form and content, Ghost Nets echoes the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with baroque illusion, theatrical space, and the tension between beauty and fragility.