Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals

59 color and numerous additional illustrations. Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals is an astounding piece of work, one in which Barker takes the most humdrum of things – plastic detrius – inserts it into an intriguing, multilayered historical narrative, lends its physical form a gossamer, airy beauty, and presents the whole to us in the form of a book.

Not just any book, but a replica of an old science publication from the 1800s, including mould-spotted pages, a library lending form and specimen labels.” – Lucy Davies, V&A Magazine May 2017 Now, 170 years after Atkins, another British woman has produced an important photobook that echoes Victorian-era science even as it exposes a contemporary environmental crisis. Mandy Barker’s Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals similarly occupies that liminal space where art and science converge, and its impeccable presentation exemplifies how book design can extend content. – Laura M. André, review on Photo-eye “Mandy Barker’s work on plastic has been developing for some time.

In its latest advance, she looks at micro-particles of plastic as a species of a lunatic plankton, floating about the sea, and she has included a rather wonderful pastiche book of old-fashioned science as a way of getting us into her subject.” – Francis Hodgson, Photography critic “Her images could be mistaken for Victorian glass-plate photographs in fact they are ornate, long-exposure studies of the plastic debris that pollutes beaches in and around Cobh in Cork Harbour, Ireland.” – Tom Seymour, British Journal of Photography “Beyond Drifting is a clever critique of a massive environmental problem – and, in focusing in on one small area of Ireland in particular, Barker highlights a global issue.” – Mark Sinclair, Creative Review