Mandy Barker by Yannick Lindner

Mandy Barker

Mandy Barker is a British artist based in the UK. She is working on international projects to make people aware of plastic waste. She started with taking photos of plastic waste at beaches but as no one took notice she started to arrange the collected plastic waste as art pieces.

In her works she often collaborates with scientists and does a research on her own about the objects she finds in the sea. She arranges found objects based on different topics, stories or cultures to create a connection to people either on a local or even worldwide scale. Her artworks contain debris which has been collected in several places around the world

Chosen Work

Hongkong Soup : 1826

I choose Barkers work Hong Kong soup. It is showing the trash from 30 different beaches in Hongkong that was collected for a period of 4 months. In Hong Kong about 1826 tonnes of waste goes into landfills per day. Each of the images of Barkers work highlights some of the found objects which escaped the landfills or recycling.

Arrangements based on different topics. They relate to the traditions, events, nature and culture of Hongkong. The intention is to rise the awareness to the citizens of Hong Kong about the crisis facing effective waste management. Objects include products from manufacturing, retail, household and hazardous waste alongside agricultural, medical and fishing related debris.

湯 (SOUP) is a description given to plastic debris suspended in the sea, in this case with a direct reference to the waste crisis in Hong Kong. The series aims to engage with the public by stimulating an emotional response, combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction with an awareness to encourage social responsibility.

Scientific background

How does Plastic end up at the Ocean?

By looking on the plastic debris in the Ocean, the first question which comes up might be: How does all the plastic came to the Oceans. Therefor there are mainly three reasons:

1. Throwing plastic into the regular waste

As regular waste often ends up in landfills, plastic can easily be blown away and will slowly find its way into water and finally the ocean

2. Littering

The heedless littering of plastic waste is the most obvious (but could be also the easiest to avoid) way plastic finds it’s way to the ocean.

3. Products that go down the drain

The third way for plastic to reach the ocean is through the drain in forms of microplastics. A lot of the products we use in our daily life are constantly loosing microfibres which will be flushed from the water into the sea

Once the plastic has made it into the Ocean, it will be moved around by the currents and can reach almost every place on our Planet from the Arctic to Antarctica and a lot of even unpopulated islands in the seas.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A lot of the plastics will be pushed into one of the gyres created by the currents of the ocean creating big plastic patches in our seas. From there each piece of plastic will not be able to move away and will be slowly degraded to microplastics under the sun. The biggest Patch today is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It contains around 80000 tons of plastics and covers an area of 1,6 million square meters.

Henderson Island

In the oceans on the Earth there are in total 5 of these big gyres, everyone of them contains a plastic garbage patch. The unpopulated island of Henderson Island is located within the south pacific gyre and has to deal with the issue of the polluted oceans. Even though the island is unpopulated it is the most polluted place by plastic in the world. All the plastic which ends up in the south pacific or which will be lost within it ends up in the south pacific garbage patch. Once in there it might end up at Henderson island.

In June 2019 a group of scientists, journalists, film makers and artists took part in an expedition to Henderson island. Mandy Barker participated in this group exploring its plastic pollution problem. The aim of the Exploration was to highlight the effect of plastic debris in our oceans and how even unpopulated areas can be affected by plastic.

Tsunami Debris Fields

Another expedition Barker took part with was the exploration of the tsunami debris field in the Pacific Ocean. At March 11 of 2011 during the tsunami in Japan 5 million tons of debris has been washed in to the pacific ocean in an single event. A lot of the debris ended up in a field floating through the pacific, ending up at the north american coast a couple of years later.

The explorations of Henderson island and the tsunami debris field are only two examples of the many explorations Barker took for researching for her artwork. Each of her art pieces has a background based on her scientific researches. In her artworks she has used a lot of different methods to deal with the movement of plastic debris.

Once she followed the route of the debris from a container ship disaster, while for her work Penalty she asked to pick up footballs from the coasts all around the world. My chosen work Hongkong Soup at the same time is dealing only with one location used for picking up debris.

Methods

For my research I tried to collect plastic debris in different locations around Bergen. One of the chosen locations has been in a fjord, the second location has been at the open sea.

I chose the area around BAS to collect plastic waste from the fjords. I collected the waste directly from the water by using a Kayak. Together with Clovis I rented a Green Kayak at the Fishers Museum in Bergen. Green Kayak is an environmental NGO with the aim to reduce the waste in the ocean. They offer free trips on Kayaks in return to collect trash from the water. We found only a few objects and by looking at their conditions they must have been floating in the sea only for a short time.

For the place on the sea I chose Øygarden, a Hotspot for plastic debris found on the coast. Currents from the north sea are arriving there. In the last years Øygarden has become known for the plastic trash which arrives at the coast. I talked with some of the local inhabitants of the islands and they told me that they are spending a lot of their free time with cleaning and picking up plastic from their local beaches. Even though I still found a lot of debris at the coast. By having a closer look on the trash I noticed that a lot of it was actually not coming from Norway. Within half an hour I had found several pieces of trash with Dutch, French or English writings on it. Also for a lot of plastic waste it seemed like that it has been in the sea for a longer time, as a lot of writings were

For both of the chosen areas it has been important to talk to locals and their experiences to locate spots with a high density of plastic debris. I found a lot in small bays and corners and in areas with flat water.

To arrange the plastic waste I have chosen a dark background similar to the method Mandy Barker is using in her works. To give more attention to the objects and to make them seem floating.