In 1989 whilst on a surf trip in Wales, Andy Hughes noticed a kind of plastic rock form, much like a small pebble but waxy in texture. He took these back to London and made a series of photographs which were shown at the Royal College of Art.

In 1990 he travelled to the Lisbon coast where he made a photograph of a 'Dead Rat' [archive page 2] this image contains a blue/grey plastic rock that we now recognise as an anthropogenic marker. A claim to the discovery of something new, something undiscovered can be made only as a formal requirement regarding the language in which the proposition itself is expressed. Is it not a paradox that the material we have come to ‘know’ recently as Plastiglomerate as described on Wikipedia may have surfaced much earlier?

In a recent interview with Carve Surf magazine, he talks about those forays from the sea to land and how those experiences inform his practice today. The images below are a small selection from Hughes's ongoing poetic visual study of this material. Some of these works were recently exhibited in China and curated by Professor Liz Wells.