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Poetry student jailed for throwing soup over Van Gogh painting

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A young poet and climate activist who took part in a Just Stop Oil protest which involved throwing soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022 has been jailed.

Anna Holland, aged 22, a postgraduate student taking an MA in writing poetry at Newcastle University, was given 20 months for causing £10,000 worth of damage to the artwork’s frame, but will serve only half of their sentence in custody. Their co-defendant Phoebe Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years.

Immediately following the sentences, other Just Stop Oil supporters threw soup over two of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings at the National Gallery. At around 2.30pm, three supporters of Just Stop Oil entered the Van Gogh ‘Poets and Lovers’ exhibition and threw Heinz vegetable soup over ‘Sunflowers’ 1889 and ‘Sunflowers’ 1888. The latter was splashed with soup by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022.

Taking off jackets they revealed Just Stop Oil T-shirts and spoke to exhibition visitors. Referring to the 25 Just Stop Oil supporters now in prison, Phil Green said: "Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history.” Ludi Simpson said: “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. 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?”

In October 2022, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland had gone to room 43 of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and hurled two tins of Heinz soup over the 1888 painting, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, before gluing themselves to the wall beneath it. In July, they were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury after three hours of deliberations. The judge, Christopher Hehir, told them at the time to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison”.

Plummer gave a 20-minute address to the judge in mitigation, in which she cited Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as examples of people who had been criminalised while fighting for justice. Outside the court, a number of Just Stop Oil supporters gathered, some of whom held posters of historical figures jailed for activism.

Staff at the gallery were worried the soup may have dripped through the protective glass and destroyed the painting, the court heard. It also heard that the damaged frame had been purchased by the gallery in 1999 and was valued at £28,000.

Sentencing the pair, the judge said the "cultural treasure" could have been "seriously damaged or even destroyed". The judge, who previously jailed the co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion for five years, added that "soup might have seeped through the glass. You couldn't have cared less if the painting was damaged or not. You had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers," he said.

Raj Chada, defending Anna Holland, said they "did check" that the painting was protected by a glass cover before throwing the soup.

In a Crowdfunder appeal launched after the guilty verdict in July Anna Holland said: “On October 14th, 2022, Phoebe Plummer and I threw tomato soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the National Gallery. We asked the question ‘what is worth more: art or life?’ On July 25th, 2024, the courts answered that question. They decided that art was more important and found us guilty of criminal damage.

“Judge Hehir - who recently made headlines by giving the longest prison sentences for non-violent protest in British history - has set our sentencing for September 27th, 2024 and is expected to give us both prison sentences in order to deter any similar actions from taking place. This is a gross misuse of his power, especially at a time when prisons are dangerously full and the country has far more pressing concerns than two young people who took action for the climate two years ago.”

In a video Anna Holland talked of the soup-throwing action as being “life-changing, in all of the best ways … one of the most empowering moments of my life … it got everyone talking about the climate crisis.” They added that a lot of the “moral outrage” was “quite misguided … we had just thrown soup on the protective glass”.   

Just Stop Oil is demanding that governments work together to establish a fossil fuel treaty, to end the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. 

 

 

 

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Comments

Uilleam Ó Ceallaigh

Tue 8th Oct 2024 17:05

Logical, MC?

Supporting the oil industry by buying a can of oil....yep, makes sense to me!

Now if they’d used sunflower oil...or would that be being woke!
💐

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M.C. Newberry

Tue 8th Oct 2024 16:48

Perhaps these "protesters" might have used a can of oil instead
to make their point in some logical sort of context? 😏

Uilleam Ó Ceallaigh

Mon 30th Sep 2024 16:05

Correct Stephen, “Life has no meaning without art”. Though, to get things into some perspective; what on earth is the value of a few drops of paint on a canvas, (in this day and age), other than a measure of the vainglorious delusions of some billionaire, who would like to keep it in their bank vault, purely for the satisfaction of owning it?
I would much rather our children and grandchildren survive to create their own art and be able to tell their and our story to future generations, i.e: That we fought their corner.

Uilleam Ó Ceallaigh

Mon 30th Sep 2024 09:46

Yeah MC, down with virtue signalling; on reflection, we should have gone feet-first into the Vietnam war when the US said “jump” without a second thought.

Oh, for the good old days when the world map was mostly pink, and Britannia’s great unwashed plebs would obediently conform in the name of our glorious empire!

Given the vast amounts of pollution created in the process, to say nothing of the cost incurred by hard-pressed UK citizens, travelling all the way to China and India, to make such a protest, would be irresponsible in the extreme.

Much more effective, would be to involve the Sally Army, who have the facilities for such a venture, to make large quantities of a glutinous broth, (to be doled out on a given date) the kind at which my mum was expert and which, pardon the pun, “used to stick to our ribs”.

The mayor’s Roller parked ouside the town hall would make an ideal target, and in frosty weather, the broth would likely set hard; the removal of which might give his chauffeur some food for thought: “waste not, want not” and all that!
💗

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Graham Sherwood

Sun 29th Sep 2024 17:50

The correct punishment if they could be trusted would be that of my mother's. You made the mess you clean it up!!

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Stephen Gospage

Sun 29th Sep 2024 17:02

It's worth adding that protest can be inconvenient or annoying, but that doesn't mean that it is wrong. I don't like what they did, but they had the best possible reason for doing it and should not be sent to prison. This punishment is a disgrace.

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M.C. Newberry

Sun 29th Sep 2024 13:43

Then go to China, India, and other vastly more relevant sources of modern pollution and make your protests there. Obsession
with climate change got into its stride with the appearance
of a book by failed Democratic US presidential candidate Al Gore back in the day. Check where Gore is found these days.
Meanwhile, the great natural sources of airborne pollution - the
massive ongoing volcanic activity above and below the oceans,
the oddly unreported methane gas eruptions from the oceans
into the atmosphere, and last but not least solar activity's
huge effect on this planet. But there's no chance of making
money or obtaining powerful influences there, of course!

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Stephen Gospage

Sat 28th Sep 2024 15:42

The Art vs Life argument is misplaced.
Life has no meaning without art and there is a sense in which protestors are going after soft targets.
However, it is absurd and disgraceful for a justice system to send these people to prison. In the end, they are trying, albeit clumsily, to draw attention to the most serious threat facing our planet today. In this respect, the 'utter clowns' are those who persist in denying the existence of man-made climate change and pretend that we need to do nothing about it.

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M.C. Newberry

Sat 28th Sep 2024 15:03

They are a product of misguided modern virtue-signalling that
seizes on a "cause" to the exclusion of moderate rational
thinking about the wider context of the very thing they are
so worked up about. These protesters - like the CND et al of
other days, never seem too keen to take their actions to where
they really matter, do they? Instead they go for soft targets in
a country that is already cutting its own nose off to spite its
industrial face, importing when it should be exporting in the
name of the climate change mantra, leaving other lands to
benefit. Climate change may be occurring (check your history) but the crucial aspect of human influence remains arguable and
already under restraint via current political policies. Logical
thinking about the ongoing need for basic fuels is hugely
desirable for a variety of reasons.

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John F Keane

Sat 28th Sep 2024 12:48

What a pair of utter clowns.

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