Mandy Barker

 

Covid finally got me and I have been floored by it so sorry for a scant week on the art room. 

Before I got ill, I was having a wonderful time helping to put together the exhibition 'Our Plastic Ocean' by Mandy Barker which opens tomorrow in Dunfermline Museum and Gallery and runs until the 11th of June.  Mandy's photographs of ocean plastics are reminiscent for me of space litter scattered as they are on the infinite blackness.  

If you are near by please come and see the exhibition it is quite amazing, horrifying and inspiring and there are some wonderful events to support it. 

Julia Barton and Littoral

It is amazing when you find a connection with someone new, a shared passion. This happened this weekend at the Fruitmarket Gallery with Julia Barton of Littoral Art an artist with a passion for seaweed, who has increasingly been distracted and distraught with the amount of plastic pollution. 

So rarely was Julia finding plastic free specimens that she started drawing the plastic into her seaweed studies you can see some of these in her books above. It needs to be said that Julia was not working on a densely populated metropolitan coast but on the remote archipelago of the Shetland Isles. 

People do not realise the impact that their actions and the plastics that they use are having and paramount to Julia's practice is to educate people about the devastation that plastic is having on our environment and ultimately our lives. 

You can get follow Julia's work and get your guide to beach litter here.

Steve McPherson

A collated flotsam and jetsam by the artist Steve Mcphereson. I love the humour, the science and the madness of these wonderfully arranged toys.

Plastic contents of...

My son gets more embarrassed by me every day, he really hates my 'bag lady' habit of picking up rubbish which is getting more ambitious all the time.

I love beach combing, as you know, but now, as well as treasure I try to remove as much rubbish as I can. One of the reasons I am passionate about this is this the images above, which are the contents of albatross guts that have died of starvation because their stomachs were so full of plastic debris.

I hope that by removing it when ever you can, from beaches near you, that it will stop the build up of this mess in remoter areas of the world where there is no one to pick it up.
I will go on embarrassing my son . . . in many ways I'm sure.

Heath Nash Flower Ball Lights

An acclaimed South African designer, Heath Nash uses discarded plastic to create stunning light shades, he calls this range 'Other peoples Rubbish'. You can read a great article about him and his work here at ping mag.

Stuart Hogarth's Chandelier

I hope that I am giving you your first sightings of Stuart Hagarth's fantastic chandeliers, and that you will be wowed like I was.

Above is Droplet formed from the bases of different water bottles at the Design Miami 2007

Below is Tide 2004

This stunning Tide chandelier is the first of a series created from flotsam and jetsam collected on a specific stretch of Kent beach it is made of clear and opaque plastics and is an analogy of the moon that has assisted in throwing this debris back to the shore. http://www.stuarthaygarth.com/