A temporary art exhibition designed to highlight plastic waste in the seas is to open this week.

A Plastic Ocean, on show at the former Dog House bar on Hamilton’s Front Street, will feature works created from marine plastic waste by a range of island artists and schoolchildren.

The event, organised by Keep Bermuda Beautiful, will also feature children’s workshops on Saturday, which are already booked up.

Hannah Horsfield of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, a coordinator for the event, said art was a useful tool to help educate the public on marine pollution.

She added: “Art is a great way to show people how devastating the impacts of pollution can be.

“Getting your hands on the actual material and being surrounded by it – we sort the plastic out into different colours and shapes – it’s quite striking and the quantity is also overwhelming.”

Ms Horsfield added that marine plastic waste was a serious threat to the health of the ocean.

She said: “Experts reckon that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea, and that’s really scary for everybody.

“All of our food chains depend on the ocean and marine plastics are choking it.

“We see it coming from humans everywhere – from the ships, from the land, from mismanagement – and it stays in the oceans for hundreds of years – so long we still don’t know the full impact of it.”

Ms Horsfield said the project was spearheaded by Katie Berry, KBB’s former executive director, but she and others were eager to keep the ball rolling after Ms Berry resigned earlier this year to care for her daughter after she was operated on for a brain tumour.

She added: “Over the past two months we have been setting it all up – it has taken a bit of time because we all have day jobs – but it has really come together nicely.”

Ms Horsfield said the exhibition will be open to the public at 6.30pm on Friday, and that members of the public will also be able to come in to see the work during children’s workshops between 10am and 3pm on Saturday.

But she added that she hoped volunteers would come forward to allow the show to run for a longer period.

Ms Horsfield said: “We are hoping that volunteers will come forward and offer to help open it throughout the week because it is quite a cool collection of interesting things and it has lessons that people need to learn.”