Thirza Schaap

Thirza Schaap graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (1995). Since then she has been working as a photographer and is now exploring new art forms through her Plastic Ocean project. She has been living and working both in Amsterdam and in Cape Town, South Africa since 2013.

After first posting her Plastic Ocean images on Instagram she was published by I-D VICE magazine (2017), followed by Lidewij Edelkoorts’s Trend Tablet, L’Officiel, Elle, Vogue, Aperture, among others. Her collection was included in the Finders Keepers exhibition at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, a design museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In 2019, during Design Week in Salone, Italy she was acknowledged by Instagram as one of four artists who present themselves successfully through social media. In 2018, she gave a lecture, workshop to go along with her exhibition at Fabrica Research Center in Venice, Italy. Plastic Ocean’s first solo exhibition opened in Amsterdam at Christie’s in collaboration with Colette Olof’s “O,Wonder!” (2018). Her first exhibition of her sculptures opened in Maastricht, The Netherlands (2019), and later that year in Cape Town in collaboration with Greenpeace Africa.