Three climate activists targeted paintings at London’s National Gallery an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland of Just Stop Oil (JSO) were sentenced for a similar attack in 2022.
According to multiple media reports, the three individuals walked into the gallery on Friday afternoon and threw Heinz tomato soup on two of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings from 1888 and 1889 – the former of which was also targeted by Plummer and Holland.
Holland, 22, received 20 months for causing an estimated 10,000 pounds (US$13,371) of damage to the painting’s frame while Plummer was sentenced for two years for the same offence. Christophere Hehir, the judge sentencing Plummer and Holland for the earlier attack, said “The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure.”
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The second stunt was not in protest of these sentences, but rather a renewed attempt by JSO to draw attention to the climate crisis. “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law,” activist Ludi Simpson, 71, reportedly told gallery visitors. “When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?”
There are currently 25 supporters of JSO in jail for climate protest. While many condemn the group’s tactics, supporters see the approach accomplishing what more traditional non-violent protest fails to do: reach people outside the movement. “I was just at Parliament Square for three days with 60,000 people, nothing happened,” one young woman told Sam Light, a UK researcher of social movements. “But my best friend throws soup on a [expletive] Van Gogh and we’re in the news for months.”
In structuring their protests to generate outrage, Light argues, JSO have made themselves a more effective voice for the movement. Yet even he admits that these attention-grabbing ploys have further polarised the issue of climate change and led to a “draconian clampdown on protest” – effectively preventing many other activists in the UK from making their voices heard.
