Booth Event – Book Signing: Mandy Barker

‘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 is a typology of discarded clothing fragments found around the coast of the UK. A homage to the work of pioneering botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799-1871)—the unique cyanotype images in the book mimic different species of marine algae found in waters around Great Britain. Through the creation of this work, photographic artist Mandy Barker hopes to raise awareness of fast fashion, synthetic clothes, and the harmful effect of microfibres in the oceans.