IT is one thing Southampton has in abundance.

Now air pollution is being harvested to create stunning artwork by a Shirley-based artist.

Jonny Hannah’s striking art has been admired by thousands of people after it was showcased in a London gallery.

The 46-year-old created his piece thanks to a ground-breaking device which turns harmful pollution collected from vehicle exhausts into purified, safe ink, called Air-Ink.

Jonny’s work was displayed at the world’s first clean air art gallery, held in Brixton, alongside other creations made by artists from the UK’s top five most polluted cities – London, Glasgow, Leeds, Southampton and Nottingham.

The gallery was launched by Tiger Beer, which has teamed up with Anirudh Sharma, the inventor of Air-Ink.

Jonny said: “It is fun to be painting a piece about my polluted city with converted pollution.

“It is not often we associate art materials with the environment, but here it is - a canvas of goodness and hopefully a half-decent image to boot.”

Jonny has lived in Southampton since 2002 and teaches at Southampton Solent University as a senior lecturer on the BA Hons Illustration course.

He also works from his shed-turned studio in his back garden.

His art shown in London was drawn with Air-Ink, which is created through a device retrofitted to the exhaust pipe of vehicles and generators to capture outgoing pollutants.

The soot goes through several industrial processes to remove heavy metals and carcinogens and the end product is a purified carbon-rich pigment.

This is then used to make different types of inks and paints.

The technology can capture up to 95 per cent of carbon soot from diesel exhausts, stopping it entering the atmosphere.

The Air-Ink creations were shown at a gallery in Brixton earlier this month - an area that surpassed its annual air pollution limit just five days into 2017.

But it’s not just London that is suffering from heavy pollution - Southampton’s toxic air is a worrying concern for the city’s civic chiefs.

Pollution is responsible for more than 100 deaths in Southampton each year and is estimated to cost the local NHS an annual £50 million.

In February, Southampton City Council was awarded grants totalling £892,000 from the Air Quality Grant programme as part of a nationwide attempt to improve Britain’s most toxic cities.