Sam Twiddy

Adrian Winter was a great friend of mine who sadly passed away last year. He was incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable and was a massive inspiration to me. His website has just expired and his work will no longer be available to view online, so am posting a very small selection of it here.

These oak leaves were some early examples of works he produced using found objects. After collecting these leaves from a woodland floor during the autumn, he photographed them individually and arranged them in varying spectra of degradation to create this set of images. They are best when viewed as large prints, as the differences in the details of the individual leaves can be studied up close and also make an impressive spectacle when viewed from a distance as a whole.

Adrian’s magpie and bower-bird tendencies were also inspired by man-made detritus. These collections of blue plastic were made from artefacts found whilst beachcombing at Morcambe Bay in Lancashire.

He was interested in the idea that the coast is a place where all that is unwanted by man eventually ends up – nuclear power stations and military ranges get shoved out to the edges of the land, sewage gets pumped out into the sea and any material lost or discarded by ships also washes ashore.

Adrian chose blue plastic to highlight this issue, as although it might seem quite an unnatural material to find in such a wild environment, it is becoming more and more commonplace and is the perfect material to use to represent our man-made and throw-away culture. The colour blue gives emphasis to the point by being such a rare pigment to occur naturally.

These images are also themed around degradation – the plastic artefacts shown have been gradually broken down by the mechanical action of the sea in combination with exposure to light and varying coastal temperatures into smaller and smaller fragments – but that is not the end of the story. Research has shown that microscopic fragments of plastic can be found in tidal sediments. The plastic does not disappear it just gets smaller. Most plastics are largely resistant to biodegradation and are thought to be likely to remain in the environment for hundreds of years. Larger fragments have been found in the digestive tracts of many marine organisms from sharks to fulmars and the deleterious effects of these is reasonably obvious. What effect micro-plastics may have, especially on micro-organisms is still unknown, though studies have shown that filter feeding organisms such as lugworms rapidly accumulate plastics if exposed to such sediments which may have a similar choking effect. Plastic as a material is relatively inert though additives such as bactericides are not. Even “biodegradable plastics” remain in the environment in micro-fragments once the starches which hold the plastic molecules together have broken down.

Adrian concluded his message by using the objects he had collected to create a map of Morecambe Bay - the area they were all found. Here, the darker plastics represent deeper waters and the more degraded and washed-out plastics are used to represent the shallow waters, where the plastics are more rapidly broken down.