Texts | Andy Hughes

Photography and Environmental Activism Visualising the Struggle Against Industrial Pollution. By Conohar Scott

This publication maps out key moments in the history of environmentalist photography, while also examining contemporary examples of artistic practice. Historically, photography has acted as a technology for documenting the industrial transformation of the world around us; usually to benefit the interests of capitalist markets. An alternative photographic tradition exists, however, in which the indexical image is used 'evidentially' to protest against incidents of industrial pollution. By providing a definition of environmental activism in photographic praxis, and identifying influential practitioners, this publication demonstrates that photography plays a vital role in the struggle against environmental despoliation.

Hermosa Beach [discussed in chapter 4 Plastic Taxonomies and the Symbiotic Real].
Book Abstract

This chapter takes as its subject the issue of marine plastic pollution by profiling several artists who collect taxonomies of plastic waste to raise awareness of this looming ecological threat. Chris Jordan's ‘Midway: Message from the Gyre’, and Mandy Barker's wry depictions of plastic waste in her series ‘SOUP’ provide a basis for understanding Timothy Morton's notion of 'hyperobjects', which suggests that there is no 'away' when it comes to the disposal of waste. Instead, we are bound to share a symbiotic future of co-existence with marine plastic pollutants. Furthermore, Ian Hodder's notion of 'entanglement' and cultural dependency on commodities provides a basis for understanding Andy Hughes’ sensuous photographs of plastic waste. Finally, Ana María Guerra's series ‘Future Fossils’, illustrates the extent to which microbiota are now co-existing with micro-plastics in the biosphere as a means of survival. The photographs of Hughes and Guerra draw attention to the idea that not unlike marine animals, humans are also trapped within a web of plastic pollution.

https://www.routledge.com/Photography-and-Environmental-Activism-Visualising-the-Struggle-Against/Scott/p/book/9781350099517

Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics
Mandy Bloomfield

Bloomfield, Mandy. "Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics." Configurations, vol. 27 no. 4, 2019, p. 501-523.
Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735224

Abstract
By focusing on contemporary experimental poetry that engages with ocean plastics, this essay explores the capacity of ecopoetics to make distinctive interventions in the environmental humanities, and in particular the blue humanities. It examines work by Stephen Collis, Adam Dickinson and Evelyn Reilly to show how poetry’s forms of
juxtaposition, linkage, linguistic porosity, indeterminacy and non-narrative temporalities suggest fertile modes of cultural engagement with the more-thanhuman oceans. This poetry cultivates amplified modes of attention to more-thanhuman scales of space, time, agency and modes of relation, and it performs highly material ways of understanding historical, economic and aesthetic forces affecting the oceans.

Extract:
At first it is difficult to know what you are looking at (image left). A large, white form fills the frame, its rough, alabaster-like surface pitted and scarred, as if by the ravages of time. Looming above the viewer’s perspective, it occupies an empty, featureless landscape like an enigmatic monument from a long-forgotten culture. Then, the moment of recognition hits; the object is, of course, just an upturned polystyrene cup, stranded on a beach by the retreating tide. That aquamarine strip just visible in the far distance will soon return to reclaim this detritus and carry it away, elsewhere. This photograph is one of a series of images of beach debris in artist Andy Hughes’s project Dominant Wave Theory.

Hughes has spent decades photographing anthropogenic waste in littoral zones; his images transform discarded trash into visually arresting, larger-than life art objects that provoke intensified forms of attention to that which normally passes beneath notice. The artist presents each found object with such compelling vibrancy that even once it is identified as
trash, the initial impression of its simultaneous significance and inscrutability lingers. In the case of the polystyrene cup, the object’s seeming monumentality suggests how, despite its ephemeral, throw-away (and thrown-away) status, it also inhabits the temporality of the unthinkably longue durée. Polystyrene’s notorious longevity and non-biodegradability has made this substance one of the iconic figures for Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects,” “materials from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium [which] will far outlast current social and biological forms.” Hyperobjects, Morton points out, “will be our lasting legacy”2 and yet because they are so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,” they outstrip our capacities to fully comprehend their implications, either scientifically or philosophically.3 Hughes’s arresting photograph holds together a series of contradictions: the fleeting use life of disposable plastics and the monumental time of non-biodegradability; the abjection of trash and the sublimity of an entity “massively distributed in time and space;” the humble scale of the hand-held object and the global reach of its ocean-borne travels; the disregarded status of waste and the intensified mode of attention commanded by the work of art.

If Hughes’s polystyrene cup appears monument-like, it is because it is indeed a kind of monument to our times, now increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene. Furthermore, what it memorializes is a momentous shift in the multispecies lives of a realm that has long been consigned to the background of cultural and environmental histories of modernity: the marine world. As John Mack has observed, “[t]he sea is not somewhere with ‘history’, at least not recorded history… [i]t is not monumentalized.”4 Along with artworks like Hughes’s, an emergent oceanic turn in the humanities is in the process of shifting that imaginary. As historian Kären Wigan notes, “the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.”5 For literary scholar Hester Blum, this endeavour also entails rethinking methodological and epistemological paradigms; “oceanic studies unmoors our critical perspective from the boundaries of the nation” and invests in “recalibrating… the gauges of time and space.”6 Moreover, for an increasing number of scholars, anthropogenic changes in the seas demand that this process of refocusing widen its compass beyond the boundaries of the human. As Philip Steinberg asserts, oceans “need to be understood as ‘more-than-human’ assemblages.”7 Perhaps precisely because “the sea is not our home,”8 the development of the marine or “blue” humanities calls for enmeshment between cultural history (traditionally the domain of the humanities) and natural history (aligned with the sciences). The work of “recalibrating… the gauges of time and space” in this context, then, also means engaging ocean worlds as natural-cultural
assemblages and negotiating varying human and more-than-human scales.

Entanglements by Lizzie Perrote

‘Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.’
(1) (G.K.Chesterton, 1910)

Writer/philosopher, G.K.Chesterton, suggests porosity between an inside and outside, a notional body and precarious environment. His words are weighted witha sense of uncanny threat, impending ruin. A similar entropic imaginary permeates work by contemporary British artists, Andy Hughes and Peggy Atherton, who have collaborated for a project, Red Creek, in response to the site of Frenchman’s Creek, a steep wooded ‘valley drowned by the sea’, (2) extending inland from the Helford Estuary, Cornwall.

During a time of existential apprehension, in the context of a global pandemic and environmental predicament, Hughes and Atherton evolved the project through a year of research and formal experimentation: visits to the creek location, conversations, readings, exploration of materials on-site and in the studio. This remote place of semi-wilderness, identified by the National Trust as an environment of outstanding ‘natural’ beauty, has, through time, been disturbed by rhythms and cycles of human consumption, both sustainable and unsustainable. Rich in resources, the valley has, from times of pre-history, been a site of extraction: hunting, habitation, global trade, colonial passage, industrial production; modernity. The forest of oaks growing and collapsing on the steep sides of the inlet, have died many deaths; denuded for building and shipping timber; burned to fuel Cornwall’s tin mining.

Red Creek is a project of entanglements: ecological, temporal, material, imaginary. Flooded daily by the sea, the Creek has a complex ever-changing ecosystem. Both artists have responded to its uncanny nature: fallen oaks draped with pelts of bladderwrack seaweed; woodlands lush with wild garlic, mingling with flows of thick, salty alluvial mud which suck down and spew up decaying matter of bodies, boats, mysterious debris. Life and death continually fold into each other and metamorphosize. It is rare to encounter other visitors and walkers in the valley, even in the summer months. The entangled trees muffle the close presence of contemporary living and, for a brief moment, it is possible to fantasize the creek as a place of primal wilderness. This illusion is always broken, continually rippled by historical traces of human activity, consumption and its wastes.

Atherton and Hughes’ diverse practices are entangled with the ‘vibrant matter’ of the creek. Photographic works and sculptural casts taken from found materials, are directly indexical to the site. Complex phenomenologies (experiences of being there): moving through thick undergrowth or picking a way along the viscous shoreline, are embedded in process. Hughes infra-red photographs capture memories of deep reds, curdling the muddy, tidal waters. However, this photographic process reverses certain natural signifiers. The variegated greens of foliage turn psychedelic, vampire red. Fallen branches become a gothic fantasy with running veins or bloody bones. Atherton’s works are performative objects, charged with uncanny potential. Sculptural assemblages of dead animals and discarded commodities become the imaginative debris from a dark drama. Atherton sited and Hughes photographed some of her work back at the creek, further amplifying feelings of its ‘bodily nature’. Working together, their practices braid environmental matter and speculative imagination ever more tightly.

Red Creek continues to entangle imaginations with matterings. After photographing Atherton’s wig sculpture, crawling with insects, Hughes discovered a reference to a diaryentry by Charles Darwin, made aboard HMS Beagle, on a colonial expedition to South America. Darwin reflected on sensations of entanglement between the bodies of Fuegan natives and their ‘savage’ forest environment. He noted the Fuegian’s ‘black, coarse, and entangled hair’. A later entry reiterated this uncanny of forest entanglement: ‘On every side were lying irregular masses of rock and torn- up trees; other trees, though still erect, were decayed to the heart and ready to fall. The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen...’

Familiar measures of human time and positionality are dissolved in the uncanny thickness of Red Creek shaped by Hughes and Atherton. Entangled with apprehension of future evolutions, my imagination spins and torques back through Chesterton’s red vision, further in time, to the prophetic menace found in Greek tragic drama, the Orestia by Aeschylus ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me’.

1. G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, Methuen, Lon- don, 1910, Chapter 10, The Red Town, pg 67. This passage was cited by Robert Smithson to introduce his essay ‘Spiral Jetty’ relating to his epic land art project in great salt lake, near Rozel point, Utah 1970.

2. Christian Boulton, Five Million Tides: A Biography of the Helford River, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2019.

3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London, 2010

4. Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self, Indiana, 2010

5. Charles Darwin quoted in Ben Carver, An Entangled Forest: Evolution and Speculative Fiction, Urbanomic/Docu- ments, 2018 - urbanomic.com,p.1. file:///C:/Users/eliza/ Downloads/Urbanomic_Document_UFD032.pdf (Accessed 10.10.21)

6. Francis Bacon quoted in David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p.190.

Embedded
By Andy Hughes

Surfboard under my arm and walking along the sand dunes back to my car after surfing at Sker Point, South Wales, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my left hand. I noticed that some sort of splinter had embedded itself into the palm of my hand. While it hadn’t bothered me while out there, concentrating on catching that wave, it was really starting to bother me now. After a long soak in a hot bath I had a go at digging out the offending article with a fine needle. And when the tiny fragment finally made it to the surface I still couldn’t quite make out what it was. As is always the case with splinters, they make you take a really close look, don’t they? You’re only wondering how anything so tiny can cause you so much pain. But much like an alien implant as often discussed in ufology, I found it difficult to determine what the hell this thing was made of. After very close inspection it turned out to be ‘just’ a small shard of plastic.

Isn’t it kind of peculiar, how such a ‘non-event’ – and it really is not worth writing home about in the greater scheme of things – can embed itself into one’s mind? A minor incident stored forever in the personal memory bank, popping back up into conscious thought decades later as the bigger picture emerges: the world’s oceans have become even more littered with man-made plastic waste.

But pollution and floating waste is nothing new or particular to the 21st century. My own experiences as a young surfer in the late 80s surfing at Sker Point, a small rocky outcrop just a few miles from the Port Talbot Steelworks and the local’s surfing location of choice when other, better spots weren’t working, gave me an early awareness of human/consumerist detritus and the problems inherent in it. Sitting astride the board in the brown dirty sea waiting for the right wave, it was not uncommon to see all manner of unpleasant things floating past: the odd panty-liner or condom, even excrement – you just had to block it out of your mind.

Regular surfers would often suffer from a host of different infections – no doubt caused by all sorts of pathogens present in the seawater. This part of the Welsh coastline, and indeed many other parts of the British Isles, was suffering heavily from ocean pollution. The invention of the flush toilet and the sewage system during the later stages of the 19th Century obviously had a lot to answer for. And then in the 1980s and 90s another pollution threat made headlines: many European countries labelled Britain ‘the dirty man of Europe’ for its air pollution, as industrial power plants emitted high levels of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Carried away by the wind these emissions would come down on other, mostly Scandinavian countries as acid rain, destroying trees and aquatic life further afield. The arrival of the environmental age and the realisation that pollution knows no boundaries.

Learning to surf as an art student aged just twenty-two certainly opened my eyes to environmental pollution as I witnessed its effects on Sker beach first-hand: large amounts of coal particles washed up from the nearby steelworks interspersed with other debris. The coal tended to render the beach black, which made the usually brightly coloured plastic waste stand out like jewels presented on a black velvet cushion. Having grown up in a blue-collar mining community in Yorkshire I had been accustomed to industrial pollution and how detrimental it can be to human health. My grandfather was a coal miner and died aged 63 of emphysema as a result of breathing and ingesting coal dust. Slag heaps, power station smoke stacks and cooling towers were the backdrop to my youth. The coast on the other hand had always appeared to me to be a place of unadulterated beauty, pristine air and waters, a place to go on holiday, rejuvenate and rejoice. But maybe I had to venture farther still, away from anywhere industrial.

And in 1995 I did just that. I moved to Cornwall, coined the “Cornish Riviera” as it is warmed by the Gulf Stream and boasts a very temperate microclimate where even some palm varieties are able to grow, where the sand on the beaches is white, the seas are clear blue and where millions of holidaymakers flock each summer to enjoy sand, sea and surf. And since the days of Whistler and Turner holidaying and painting in St. Ives at the beginning of the 20th century, followed by artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and Mark Rothko, art practice has been an important aspect in this part of Britain. But once there, I quickly found that all was not as pristine as it seemed. Local surfers had started a campaign called “Surfers against Sewage” as they found themselves contracting viral illnesses. So here I am, living in a place where people pay to come on holiday, and yet, during my daily walks along the beaches near my home I came across the same flotsam and jetsam that I had encountered before. Washed up waste, plastic waste mainly.

My own ‘journeying’ across the dunes and beaches at low tide all follow a certain pattern: short walks, long walks, walking the dogs, and so on. Land and sea appear like a curtain in continuous motion. During these walks it is not the organic forms, or shells, nor seaweed or other organic matter that stands out for me, it is the abject matter of humanity that punctuates the experience of the walk for me, leaving a lasting impression. The object – first made, then desired, and finally rejected by man/woman – within its natural setting, the place where it finally came to rest by sheer happenstance. In my photographs rubbish is rendered as part of the contemporary sublime. The use of scale and saturated colours help to draw the eye to the subject (or object/abject). The viewer’s response is one of ambiguity: in the first instance the mind is seduced by a beautiful aestheticism absolved from contextual meaning (i.e. “This is a beach and this rubbish should not be here.”), followed by the secondary reaction of repulsion, when the mind realises and computes the contextual meaning as “This is a beach and this rubbish should not be here”.

Wherever we go in the world – waste is all around. But as waste is transported on large container ships away from one nation or continent to another to be treated, utilised, and ultimately manufactured into new waste, the oceans’ currents do their bit to transport all other ‘unorganised’ waste streams around our planet to wash up where it will. There isn’t a place on this globe where traces of plastic cannot be found. No longer a mere local problem, but a huge global problem. Plastic waste seems to me to be the ultimate Kristevian abject matter – once desired, then discarded and reviled. What we can’t see may not bother us, but just imagine the ultimate effect of plastic flotsam for a minute: with nature exerting its abrasive forces plastic items will break into smaller pieces over time – as my splinter story so aptly demonstrates. Personally, I fear that the toxic elements of plastic will enter the food chain, climbing all the way up to the top, where ultimately it’ll be ending inside my body. Embedded once again.

© Andy Hughes 2013 // Gyre The Plastic Ocean // ISBN-13: 978-1861543554

The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in
Contemporary Art and Photography
By Dr Abigail Susik

Gradually over the last century, the ancient symbolic rapport between humanity and the sea has changed and contemporary culture at large is taking notice. The formerly awe-inspiring sublimity of the ocean as a cultural symbol has now given way to a new kind of disturbing awareness: humanity can no longer fully escape itself through exploration of alien marine reaches. To be sure, many of the literal and metaphoric associations of the ocean remain firmly ensconced in place as they have for centuries. The ocean’s tidal force still threatens human life on a terrifying scale, just as its depths continue to harbor myriad scientific mysteries. Yet it is also apparent that the ocean has submitted in diverse ways to the persistent shaping forces of the human hand, and this in turn has shifted our conception of its semantic identity.

What was once one of the supreme spaces of otherness from a human perspective has been replaced in the last half-century or so by an often grotesque experience of unavoidable self-reflection. Reversing the subliminal onus of the prehistoric flood myth, it is rather a tidal wave of man-made materiality that surges to embrace the globe’s seas in a mass of brightly coloured plastic bits. As flotsam from around the globe clutters the most remote beaches and swirling vortices of buoyant trash form new islands in the Pacific, the old horror vacui and mortal fear of the oceanic transforms into suffocating claustrophobia and violent auto-critique. Continuing to function culturally as a physical simulacrum of the human unconscious as it long has, the ocean repeatedly regurgitates and resurfaces what most of modern society has been attempting to repress for some time now. As the unwitting toilet and primary commercial highway for global commerce, the world’s oceans starkly uncover the fact that culture and nature now interpenetrate physically and symbolically, and are equivalent in both power and influence.

The general consensus seems to be that the palpable pollution of the world’s oceans with non-biodegradable flotsam is a dangerous problem, and yet most of society assumes a passive pose as to what can be done about it. Meanwhile, these shifting surfaces are unceasingly incrusted with a vast array of commodities being transported, ensuring the endurance of this consumption cycle. Although this condition of passivity certainly plagues us on both practical and psychological levels in an everyday manner, it is also significant that a sizeable subset of the art world is taking notice of this environmental and anthropological situation. Several artists from around the globe have recently turned to the realm of the ocean as subject matter for their photographic work, and notably, each of these artists reflect a similar set of sociological conditions in relation to this watery milieu. Echoing what has become the status of nearly every realm of human experience today, it seems, these works stringently comment upon the way in which the world’s seas have become lucid indicators of the omnipresence of global capitalism and the resulting lifestyle of discard.

Therefore a palpable trend has arisen which, along with communicating something about the predominance of the photographic mode in western cultural manifestations and the important ramifications of this shift itself in late twentieth-century art, also speaks profoundly to the fact that the ocean has once again emerged as paramount cultural indicator at large. Rather than revealing any nostalgic return to the formerly sublime associations of the ocean as a zone of both horror and pleasure, or a modernist understanding of the ocean as a self-reflexive matrix, I argue that new themes arise via this recent influx. The current resurgence of interest in the ocean among contemporary artists, primarily photographers, speaks to the heightened awareness of the ocean as a location which transparently reflects the total permeation of life, and art, with commercial languages. Attached to this is my claim that these works activate political consciousness about environmental issues related to human waste through a complex aesthetic operation involving confrontation with both the beautiful and the repulsive, the desirable and the repellent, thereby creating a kind of convergence zone or tidal vortex for some of our most powerful emotions about modern materiality and our interactions with it.

"One artist working in this vein is the British photographer Andy Hughes, who photographs beach trash at his home of West Cornwall as well as at beaches internationally. In Hughes’s hands, the familiar beached flotsam takes on a strangely monumental identity, not entirely unlike its precursor in Haacke’s monument to beach trash (Fig. 8). Looming large in the frame, and exquisitely lit, these cast-off commodities become ironic monoliths of this age of humanity, the plastic era. As if seen from the distant future, Hughes depicts them as melancholy relics of a lost culture that consigned itself to doom through overproduction".

Read the full text here:
http://drainmag.com/convergence-zone-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-the-ocean-in-contemporary-art-and-photography/
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Gyre: The Plastic Ocean
Report by Andy Hughes

In 1997, Captain Charles Moore was sailing across the Pacific Ocean, when he and his crew caught sight of plastic waste floating on the sea surface.[i] The significance of spotting this debris, in one of the most remote regions of the ocean, was a major environmental discovery. Plastic and other forms of human waste have been floating at sea and washing ashore long before 1997 but this specific discovery drew attention to the issue, and since then oceanographers, marine biologists, scientific research teams, and clean ocean and wildlife advocacy groups across the globe have discussed and researched the topic in greater detail. There are various research projects looking at the distribution of this garbage, its effects on sea life, and, in turn on the various ecosystems by which all life on earth depends. Plastic waste on land and sea now attracts significant attention in the media and continues to be the focus of a growing group of concerned artists as well as designers, scientists, writers, explorers and environmentalists. More recently researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis calculated that at least 4.8 million metric tons of plastic material enters the ocean each year. However, it should be noted that this is a low calculation, and the team has suggested the amount could be 12.7 million metric tons [ii]

In 2011, a team of curators and marine science experts at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center and the Alaska Sea Life Centre met to discuss the topic of plastic, waste and its increasing visibility in the ocean across the world. Over a period of two years, the team developed a project with the intention to explore complex relationships between humans and the ocean. The project was created to specifically facilitate cross-pollination between various discourses; art, science and advocacy. The participants were convened to look at the mass consumption of material goods and the resulting proliferation of plastic waste in the marine environment. The results of these meetings and activities were shared among peer groups and were integral to the creation of a survey exhibition. [iii] An international team of scientists, artists and educators were approached, all of these were identified as having made some significant contribution to the discourse surrounding plastic waste and the Ocean. [iv] The team titled the project Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. This refers to the term 'ocean gyre'. There are five ocean gyres, each gyre shifts vast volumes of water in a circulatory motion across the earth. The world’s oceans are dominated by these gyres. They can be hundreds to thousands of miles in diameter. Along with other ocean current systems, they re-distribute and aggregate all kinds of debris in our oceans, with plastic waste being an ever-increasing ingredient.

1.1 The expedition
In the summer of 2013, the team was assembled in Anchorage, Alaska. They joined a crew aboard the research vessel RSV Norseman and journeyed along the Alaskan coastline with Hallo Bay being the final destination. The boat travelled over 500 nautical miles stopping and landing at various remote beach locations. Various research activities took place on board the ship and on shore. Each artist and scientist developed discrete activities; for example, Oli Maden carried out spectroscopy with various samples of plastic collected from the beach; Nicholas Mallos continued his research work on the global distribution and origins of plastic bottle tops; and Mark Dion carried out various systematic collecting activities. Throughout the expedition, conversations were recorded and film interviews took place, and there were a number of presentations made to the group by onboard team members. These presentations ranged from work being carried out to identify fishing nets to explanations about the processes by which marine waste is distributed at sea. The team also met with wildlife experts and undertook a beach clean-up operation with Katmai Park Rangers. And at Hallo Bay, they experienced the thrill of a close encounter with a female grizzly bear and her three cubs. These unique experiences, the presented texts and diaries, and the films and artwork, considered and highlighted plastic as a very particular ecological problem. All of these outcomes and discussions were organised and curated to form the final project event

1.2 The touring exhibition
The exhibition Gyre: The Plastic Ocean opened in February 2014. It displayed some of the resulting scientific discoveries made on the journey and included the art created by each invited artist. The exhibition also incorporated content from the Burke Museum’s “Plastics Unwrapped” exhibition, offering a scientific and cultural history of how plastics are used in our daily lives. In addition to the featured artists, the curator selected works from other international artists from around the world. The presented visual works were complemented by a collection of essays from eminent scientists and writers who were linked through the common thread of the Gyre project. Each element discusses ideas connected to plastic waste, covering eco-artistic-activism through to scientific theory and marine biology; their contributions extend and put into context ideas initiated by the organisers. The exhibition ran for six months in Anchorage (2014) before travelling to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta (2015), Fisher Museum in Los Angeles, (2015) and the University of Southern California, Santa Cruz University, (2016).

1.3 The book
The accompanying book Gyre: The Plastic Ocean explores and examines the relationship between plastic waste as both an object of visual, creative, and artistic inquiry alongside scientific reports and info-graphical presentations of current scientific data sets. This book resides as a key reference text, a text that can be seen as an additional source of knowledge within the current global environmental discourse. It visually presents its ideas, questions, and conclusion through the interplay of nature and consumer culture.

1.4 The film and symposia
In support of the project, two filmmakers were on board to document the expedition, commissioned by National Geographic, this film was shown at each exhibition venue. It was submitted to various film festivals since its completion and was shortlisted for a number of oceanic film awards. It is available to buy or can be watched online on various websites. A one-day symposium event took place at the Anchorage Museum during the opening week. And in an effort to raise awareness and discourse on the global crisis of plastic pollution, the Welch Foundation at Georgia State University (GSU), David J. Sencer Museum of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) jointly hosted another Gyre focused symposium. The Anchorage Museum continues to host an archived site dedicated to the project.

2.0 Impact
Data from the Anchorage Museum showed that in May 2014 the Gyre Project was the subject of 80 news media stories, including in the New York Times, Wired, and Slate. These featured reviews and stories had a circulation of more than 50 million. It is difficult to aggregate data in terms of calculating the response to this project, there have been a number of similar projects since. Other organisations such as the Cape Farewell Project, continue to develop and create cooperative projects where artists and scientists work together. Museums, arts organisations, designers, NGO's, and others continue to explore plastic as both creative material and as a destructive and problematic substance. Plastic is becoming even more visible, and this project and others like it will continue to add to and create further debate and discourse.
© Andy Hughes 2017

2.1 References and further reading

Bibliography
Decker, J. (2014) Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. London, Booth Clibborn Editions.

Anchorage Museum Mini Site https://www.anchoragemuseum.org/exhibits/gyre-the-plastic-ocean/exhibit-overview

Georgia State University Symposia Mini Site http://artdesign.gsu.edu/plastic-gyre-artists-scientists-activists-respond/

National Geographic Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5m8b28eqA

Burke Museum Plastics Exhibition http://www.burkemuseum.org/exhibits/past

[i] Moore, C., Phillips, C. Plastic Ocean (2011). How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans.
USA, Avery Publishing.

[ii] Julie Cohen. (2015) An Ocean of Plastic. Available from http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/014985/ocean-plastic [Accessed 19th February 2016]

[iii] A survey exhibition or group exhibition are usually collective and often focus on a specific theme or topic (“survey shows”).

[iv] Expedition Leader Howard Ferren, former director of the Alaska SeaLife Center. Lead Scientist, Carl Safina, Blue Ocean Institute.

Curator
Julie Decker, Anchorage Museum

Scientists
Odile Madden, Smithsonian Institution, research scientist
Dave Gaudet, Alaska Marine Stewardship Foundation, director
Nicholas Mallos, Ocean Conservancy, conservation biologist
Peter Murphy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
John Maniscalco, Alaska SeaLife Center

Artists
Mark Dion, New York
Andrew Hughes, England
Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Anchorage
Karen Larsen, Anchorage
Pam Longobardi, Atlanta
Katherin Schafer, Biology Teacher, Harker School

Photographer
Kip Evans, Mountain and Sea Productions

Filmography
J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas, Dudes on Media for National Geographic

Extract from essay 'The Photographs' in Dominant Wave Theory
By Dr Chris Short

Across the body of photographs contained in the present volume, we may identify three dominant issues, each of particular importance to Hughes’s encounter with West Cornwall in general and St Ives – Hughes’s home for nearly a decade – in particular. The first is the formal, aesthetic engagement of the land and sea that was so important to leading British modern artists in and around St Ives from about 1930. Hughes describes his relationship to this tradition as ambivalent, at one moment developing in relation to it, at the next seeking to avoid it. The second is the remarkable increase in tourism in the area in recent years, fuelled not only by the beauty of the land and sea but by the extraordinary success of Tate St Ives in bringing tourists – cultural and recreational – with money to the area. This has impacted most importantly (in the present context) on the quantity and quality of art produced in and around the town, for sale in the town’s innumerable galleries. As a contemporary artist living and working in the area, it is inevitable that Hughes has developed a critical relation to such practice. The third is the beach itself which, for both “local” and visitor alike, serves as a site of escape from the pressures of commercial life and, at the same time, as a site of contamination, as the place where the excesses of that commercial life – food wrappers, drink containers, sewage – get washed-up. As a surfer and frequent walker of the shorelines in and around St Ives, the beach forms an important focus for Hughes’s recreational as well as professional activities. The following will attend to each of these issues in turn, exploring the ways in which it impacts upon the photographs.

The story of art’s importance to St Ives begins at least as early as 1811 when Turner visited, but it was in 1877 that the Great Western Railway arrived in the town, facilitating development of tourism and bringing with it an influx of artists. In 1883-4, Whistler and Sickert visited the town and about this time, the Newlyn School was founded eight miles south of St Ives. The town’s first full-time studios were established in 1885 and in 1888, the St Ives Art Club was founded. As the town’s fishing industry fell into decline, then, a new economy began to develop, one based in tourism and which brought with it an art community that would, in time, become increasingly important as an object of tourism itself.

The permanent collection of Tate St Ives gives a clear indication of the kind of art which came to be produced from the late 1920s, the beginning of St Ives modernism. While a variety of styles is evident, much of the painting and sculpture tends toward the abstract while remaining rooted in nature. Popular accounts of such art describe the use of colour and form as direct products of the particular quality of light that is apparent in and around the town, the extraordinary colours of the sea, the forms of the granite outcrops and cliffs, and so on.

Those accounts that highlight the importance of such natural forces of the country and seaside are, in part, accurate. For the artists, the move from city to country was a kind of return to nature, a recovery of a more authentic existence that would be embodied in their art. This was accompanied by an interest in the primitive, the quest for which led to the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood “discovering” and learning from the naive paintings of the retired seaman, Alfred Wallis. Place and art, then, configured as a retreat from the decadent forms of the city and corrupt civilisation, as a primitivism shared with much of modern art. Throughout Europe and North America, such artists’ colonies arose as alternatives to perceived social and cultural decay. But set against this quest for the primitive and the jettisoning of convention, stands evidence of considerable learning, the antithesis of the primitive as it was conceived. Without a knowledge of Cubism, there could be no Nicholson; without a serious engagement with international constructivism, there could be no Barbara Hepworth; without the precedents of European and American Expressionism, no Patrick Heron. St Ives modernism is important not merely as an escape from the horrors of modernity, but as a radical and important part of the history of the development of British and international modern art.

In conformity with much international constructivist art, Hepworth described how the formal concerns of such abstract art could assume social and political significance:

A clear social solution can be achieved only when there is a full consciousness in the realm of thought [… The artist’s] conscious life is bent on discovering a solution to human difficulties by solving his own thought permanently […] formal relationships have become our thought, our faith, waking or sleeping – they can be the solution to life and to living. This is no escapism, no ivory tower, no isolated pleasure in proportion and space – it is an unconscious manner of expressing our belief in a possible life.

Hepworth goes on to write of the emancipation of people from all social classes in attainment of freedom. It is clear that such concerns are thoroughly embedded within the formal ambitions of her abstract art. In contrast, the commitment of a number of other important St Ives moderns, such as Heron, was purely to the formal and compositional development of abstract art. Thus, Heron wrote of the importance of art’s autonomy precisely from such socio-political concerns, and in favour of a radical, purely artistic programme.

At first glance, the realism of Hughes’s photographs is quite remote from the economy of Hepworth’s constructivism or the colourism of Heron. What could be further removed from such formalism than a crumpled plastic bottle lying on a beach? Yet it is also clear that, for example, the photograph entitled Bluebird converts a lowly bit of detritus into a monumental, sculptural form, one in certain respects reminiscent of precisely the sculpture of Hepworth. The photograph undermines the object’s status as a bottle: the extraordinary angle from which it is photographed which suggests the enormous scale of the object; the intense light and thus tonal values; the deep saturation of colour. All combine to remove from the object its previous function and attribute the piece of detritus a purely formal status. It becomes abstract art.

The same is true for very many of the photographs contained in the present volume. For example, the formal beauty of 14. A perfectly articulated yellow line cuts through the sand-coloured foreground, and the tonally graded blue sea and sky. A straw, the line is nonetheless first and foremost an element of formal beauty, its shadow merely an index of the source of such intense colours. Contradicting the rectilinear form of the yellow line in 14 is the caprice of the blue line – actually, discarded wrapping tape – in 25. The energy of the line is quite different from that which dominates 14, but it is a line that configures in relation to its environment no less beautifully than the yellow straw. Repeatedly, we are presented with images which call attention to themselves as primarily arrangements of form and colour.

Repeatedly, though, the previous identity of the objects depicted threatens to return, to destroy the purely formal quality of the work. Unlike Hepworth’s social message that remains buried within the form of the work of art, Hughes’s photographs speak with two, apparently contradictory voices. The aesthetic dimension of the photographs is challenged the moment that each object, as waste, speaks. The voice with which it speaks is social and political: it speaks of responsibility, of economic excess, even of destruction. This conflict between “pure form” and political content, though, is not a relationship of “either-or”; the tension between the two is precisely what is at stake. In these photographs, pure form couples uneasily with the pollutants of an industrial society.

More troubling is what happens when the “escapism [… and] isolated pleasure in proportion and space”, against which Hepworth warned, is isolated from St Ives modernism’s radical artistic (sometimes social and political) ambitions and serves a merely economic one. This is precisely what has happened in recent years, as art has become a leading commodity within the tourist trade of St Ives. Thus, we arrive at our second issue of importance to understanding Hughes’s photographs.

As one walks along Fore Street, St Ives and explores the alleys leading to and from it, one is presented, apart from the pasty and surf (clothing) shops, with a series of “galleries” and art shops selling images and constructions, most of which relate to the town and its surrounding country and seaside. From postcards depicting views and fishermen made of shells, to reproductions of paintings, original paintings by unknown artists and paintings by known artists, the variety of stuff – with prices to match every pocket – is extraordinary. Within these latter artistic forms, we identify the development of a kind of “house-style” of “original” painting, one which depicts the land and sea but deploys a near abstract manner. In such works, the radical ambitions of St Ives modernism, which had probably run its course by the early 1960s, are reduced to a completely formulaic enterprise. Thus, the only value attached to the objects is one of exchange, the imagery is reduced to pure surface that simulates art, that generates nothing other than profit. It is what one of modernism’s foremost critics called “kitsch,” ersatz culture to placate the masses and to ensure that their meagre incomes are returned to the privileged minority.

Such art feeds off the tourist trade and, at the same time, becomes a tourist attraction. The broader effects of tourism are still more profound. Those who travel to St Ives bring much needed money to the region; the bi-products of that spending are far less desirable. Through the summer months, vast quantities of food are consumed and converted into effluent which finds its way into the sea and, sometimes, the guts of swimmers and surfers. Other stomach-churning waste also finds its way to the sea via underground sewage pipes; thus the ubiquitous condoms and panty-liners that grace the shore. Like the beautifully described yet amorphous patches of white, cream and bright orange within the central orb of 91 – forms simultaneously reminiscent of bacterial growth and vomit – such waste suggests putrifaction and provokes a sense of abjection. Arriving more directly on the beach are fast-food and drink wrappers left after days in the (occasional) sunshine; plastic bottles, cardboard packages, tin cans and crisp packets. Residues of the residual fishing industry – broken nets, ropes, floats – contest this space; at least they have a rustic charm and seem to “belong”.

All appear in Hughes’s photographs. They are, as it were, the visual culture of contamination, a culture that recurs in less visible form in the water and air as the pollutants of an advanced capitalist economy. Such culture would appear to be the complete antithesis of that which the town and country around St Ives is known for: man living and working in harmony with nature. Like the spectrum of light created by oil on water, as we touch that which seems most beautiful, we destroy it. In their sinister beautification of the visual culture of contamination, Hughes’s photographs constitute a critique of the pollutant outcomes of our commodity culture. As representations of beach, sea and landscape, the natural beauty they offer is a spoilt one and thus, the photographs also constitute a critique of the purely aestheticising house-style of St Ives which contributes to the commodification (and thus destruction) of the landscape.

© 2006 Dr Chris Short

Art Now Cornwall
Tate Gallery St Ives

The images in this exhibition come from Dominant Wave Theory, a recently published book of photographs made on various beaches around West Cornwall, Scotland and the USA over the last six years. An active member of Surfers Against Sewage, his photographs consider the epic and the everyday in the detritus washed up on the region's shorelines. These are not ordinary photographs but express the latest twenty - first century developments in mass market colour photography - plastic on plastic you might say.

In terms of subject matter and approach, some of these images recall the work of Keith Arnatt and his exhibition Rubbish and Recollections 1989. Originally a conceptual sculptor in the 1970's, Arnatt placed his photographic work firmly in the British Landscape tradition with his Polythene Palmers 1987, photographs which ironically depicted Arcadia as described by Samuel Palmer in his utopian visions of landscape.

Whilst Hughes' images of plastic depicted in heroic scale may give us some concern about waste material and its impact upon a sensitive maritime environment, there is another side to these intelligent images. Hughes presents us with not only an ecological message but a knowing heady rush through artistic strategies using the power of photography's saturated colour to highlight, frame, and play with scale, in an irreverent awareness of art historical practices.

Using technical aspects of the medium to portray a tiny object as something of heroic scale is a favorite trick of photography as is is the careful crop and use of the rectangle to suggest something beyond the the picture plane [ for example, an extensive landscape]. In the context of the St Ives school, the artist knowledge has influenced a number of these images. But it is the distinctive nature of the medium that has been exploited all too often; photography has the capacity to picture the world in a most mysterious manner. It is as if the technology had a direct connection with the artist's Id, where the collective experiences of his physical and cultural landscape have soaked into his mind reside.

Perhaps this is why some of the objects portrayed here remind us of other things, suggesting a transformation has been made by the processes that govern photography. Why is it that a shard of plastic looks like a crashed UFO ? How can it be that that piece of foam looks like a bit of Robbie the Robet circa 1951 or a monster ( depending on which way you look at it) ? And how stunning is that landscape which has the look of granite and stitching at the same time as it shocks you into realising that it is the chain-mail gloved hand of a resting Saracen Knight ?

© TateGallery 2007 | © Susan Daniel-McElroy / ISBN - 978-1-85437-7