Photography courtesy of Jason deCaires Taylor

Underwater sculpture is an environmental art form invented by British diver and sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, who is now hard at work creating more than 400 life-size sculptures that will form the world’s largest underwater sculpture museum. Located off of Cancun — Mexico’s largest tourist destination — the waters where the sculptures are located are visited by over 750,000 people each year.
     Taylor’s sculptures are made of environmentally safe materials that encourage reef regrowth, and located on the ocean floor in areas that won’t harm existing ecosystems, thus allowing the much-damaged coral to regrow and create whole new ecosystems to support fish, crustaceans, and other invertebrates. The eery underwater presence of the life-size human sculptures involved in various activities (reading the paper; lounging in underwater gardens; maintaining an archive of messages in bottles) serves to distract the tourists, whose dives have thus far only worked to harm the Caribbean reefs, in order to prevent them from doing further damage.