2025

‘In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rock pool that changed my life. Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed, started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections by British Photographer Mandy Barker aims to raise awareness of fast fashion, synthetic clothes, and the harmful effect of microfibres in the oceans. The overconsumption and waste of cheap clothing, garments often worn only a few times (sometimes never at all), and then discarded. For this new work the artist has recovered waste clothing from 121 locations around the coast of Britain, presenting them as unique cyanotype images. The project was inspired by the work of Anna Atkins, a Victorian botanist and photographer whose groundbreaking book, ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843,’ Barker has based her own work on, but rather than showing natural algae and seaweed as Atkins did, Barker chose to show the clothing and garments recovered from the same British shorelines.

2025

2025

2026