Red Creeper | 2020
Covid-19 has given Hughes a new perspective in the subject of waste, viruses and the beach. Inspired by the H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, Hughes has created a this new series of photographs.

Andy Hughes’ book Dominant Wave Theory includes essays by world-leading scientists. Published by Booth-Clibborn Editions [London] & Abrams [New York], it critiques issues of plastic exploration.

Andy Hughes was the first Artist in Residence at the Tate Gallery St. Ives and a short-listed reserve residency artist for the Arts Council England Antarctic Fellowship. He has since exhibited across America and Europe.

Andy Hughes was one of three international artists and seven scientists to work on ‘Gyre: The Plastic Ocean’ - a world first project that explored the integration of science and art to document and interpret the issue of plastic in the marine setting.

Andy Hughes photographic work explores the littoral zone and the politics of waste. He is one of the first artist photographers who explored plastic as a metaphor, subject and pollutant. It was in the late 1980s when as an art student he learned to surf and became concerned about the increasing levels of human sewage and plastic he observed in the sea. He lives and works in Cornwall, England.

‘Very few directors have tackled the complex relationship between environmental issues and digital games. With Plastic Scoop, Andy Hughes makes that connection painfully manifest. By appropriating both the aesthetics of video games and the language of vintage promotional videos and other archival material, à la Adam Curtis, Hughes reminds us that we have become aliens to our own planet’.

Matteo Barretti / Gamescenes.org

PlasticScoop
A Machinima Film - Funded by Sustainable Earth Institute, Plymouth University

In 1989 Hughes began a thirty-year odyssey making photographs of washed-up material along the coastline. From Wales to Alaska, California to Scotland and from New York to Cornwall; his obsession has become even more relevant.