• Beyond Drifting Artist Edition
  • Beyond Drifting Artist Edition
  • Beyond Drifting Mandy Barker
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Artist Edition Prints – Option 1
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Artist Edition Prints – Option 2
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Artist Edition Microscopic Specimen Slide
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Research Notes Sketch Book
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Research Notes Sketch Book
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Research Notes Sketch Book
  • Mandy Barker Beyond Drifting Research Notes Sketch Book

Beyond Drifting: Artist Edition
Mandy Barker

Artist Edition of 40

Each Artist Edition includes:
+ Handmade bespoke box, foil-stamped Beyond Drifting, signed and numbered edition of 40
+ Beyond Drifting hardcover book, 104 pages, 23×17.5cm with 59 colour photographs + illustrations throughout, signed
+ Artist’s Research Notes – process sketch book from the making of Beyond Drifting, 50 pages, signed and numbered in an edition of 50
+ Microscopic specimen slide, handmade by the artist and mounted in card, signed and numbered in an edition of 40
+ Choice from two sets of two limited edition giclée prints made by the artist, signed and numbered editions of 20

OUT OF PRINT

This product is currently out of stock and unavailable.

Description

Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals encapsulates in miniature the much larger environmental problems of an imperfect world. This work highlights a major subject of environmental concern with a unique collection of plankton ‘specimen’ photographs – revealed to be beautifully photographed objects of plastic debris recovered off the southern shores of Ireland. Antique design reflects on a time before plastic, while exposing the urgent issue of severe pollution in our natural environment.

Each Artist Edition box of Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals is truly one of a kind! (See more images by clicking the image above)

+ The bespoke, handmade box (24x21x4.5cm) is wrapped in black linen buckram with Beyond Drifting foiled in satin gold on the rounded edge (foil not currently shown). Signed edition of 40 (labeled inside).

+ The Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals hardcover book is 104 pages, 23×17.5cm with 59 colour photographs and illustrated throughout with texts and drawings by John Vaughan Thompson from his 1830 book Zoological Researches, and Illustrations Or Natural History of Nondescript Or Imperfectly Known Animals, in a Series of Memoirs – an inspiration behind Mandy’s series. Hand-finished and signed copy.

The following elements are handcrafted, and personally finished by Mandy Barker:

+ The artist’s Research Notes (23×17.5cm) presents 50 pages reproduced from Mandy’s original sketch book from the making of Beyond Drifting. She started the sketch book while on a residency at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Cork in Ireland and maintained during her conceptual development of the trade edition book. Providing a complete picture of Mandy’s experience of retrieving plastic objects in the Cove of Cork, it also documents her thinking process behind the creation of the series. The book is wire bound with black GF Smith ‘Wild’ paper covers, debossed on the front and featuring tip-ins by the artist. Signed on a label in the back, Research Notes is numbered in an edition of 50.

 

+ The Microscopic Specimen Slide is uniquely handmade with microplastic particles retrieved by the artist, labeled from the Cove of Cork, mounted in card and presented in a glassine sleeve. Signed and numbered in an edition of 40.

 

+ CHOOSE FROM ONE OF TWO PRINT SET OPTIONS. Sets of two limited edition giclée prints (15x21cm) are made by the artist, wrapped in glassine and presented in a red GF Smith ‘Colorplan’ paper envelope, signed and numbered in editions of 20.

– Print Set Option 1 (each is 1/20) **SOLD OUT**
A specimen photograph of Prolcessa Edustilcui (This image does not appear in the Beyond Drifting book)
A diptych of the specimen photograph of Nebulae Plaurosbrathic, paired with the original recovered plastic object Plastic Flower, Partially Burnt

– Print Set Option 2 (each is 1/20) **SOLD OUT**
A specimen photograph of Ophelia Medustica
A diptych of the specimen photograph Plividas Chloticus, paired with the original recovered plastic object Barbie Doll Arm

For further details about this project, see descriptions on the trade edition book page: Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals

The Author

Based in England, UK, Mandy Barker is an international award winning photographer whose work involving marine plastic debris has received global recognition. Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals was shortlisted for the 2017 Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability, and the publication nominated for the 2018 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.

Barker’s work has been published widely including in TIME, National Geographic, Wired, The Financial Times, The Guardian, VICE, Smithsonian, and in numerous photographic publications. She has exhibited worldwide including at The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Photographers Gallery and Somerset House in London, United Nations Headquarters and The Aperture Foundation in New York, and The Science and Technology Park in Hong Kong. She was awarded the LensCulture Earth Award in 2015 and The Royal Photographic Society’s Environmental Bursary in 2012 which enabled her to join scientists for a research expedition in the tsunami debris field in the Pacific Ocean. In 2018 she received the National Geographic Society Grant for Research and Exploration.

www.mandy-barker.com

Reviews + Press

“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 Spring 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

“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, BJP

“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

“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, review from Unseen

See more press for Beyond Drifting
Hyperallergic’s choice, 16 Art and Design Books for Your Holiday Gift List
Review by Joerg Colberg in Conscientious Magazine, “Imperfectly Known Animals”
Photo-eye review by Laura M. André
Feature in Hyperallergic, “Imagine if a Victorian Scientist Studied the Plastic Debris in Our Oceans”
Review in V&A Magazine (by Lucy Davies), Spring 2017
Audio interview with The Documentary Photographer Podcast by Roger Overall, Episode 27
Feature in Smithsonian, “These Haunting Photographs Call Attention to Plastic Trash Swirling in the Ocean”
Feature in The Guardian, “Red alert: Kofi Annan on the photos that capture our choking planet”
Feature in Creative Review, “Unnatural History: The New Creatures in our Oceans”
Feature Interview with Photoworks
Feature in The Telegraph Magazine, 29 April 2017
Preview in BJP, “On show: Prix Pictet ‘Space’ at the V&A”
Feature in New Scientist, “Animal or Mineral?”, 22 April 2017 (Issue #3122)
Feature in RPS Journal, April 2017
Feature on Live Science, “Mysterious ‘Plastic Plankton’ Art Exhibit Reveals Extent of Ocean Pollution”
Feature on Wired.com, “Is that plankton? Nope, it’s trash”
Features in DMU News: “This beach is 12ft deep in rubbish”; “Photography graduate’s powerful images published in first book”
Feature in Marie Claire Italy, “Il futuro e ibridazione”, March 2017 issue
Feature in British Journal of Photography, ‘Cool + Noteworthy’, Jan 2017 issue (Showcasing the book dummy)
Feature on LensCulture
Interview with Parley, “A Beautiful Mess”

Special notes

* Mandy Barker and Overlapse NOMINATED for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 for the publication Beyond Drifting

* This body of work was shortlisted for 2017 Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability.

* Selected Photobooks of 2017: David Solo (for Photobookstore Magazine)

* Hyperallergic’s choice, 16 Art and Design Books for Your Holiday Gift List

* Beyond Drifting selected by Smithsonian Magazine: The Ten Best Photography Books of 2017

Exhibitions in 2017/2018
June 2018 at Triennial of Photography, ‘A Breaking Point: ENTER’ Exhibition, Hamburg
8-17 September 2017 at Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden
6-28 May 2017 at the V&A in London
28 May – 2 July 2017 at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Cork, Ireland
Through June 2017 at Nature Museum Fryslân – Noorderlicht Plastic: Fossil to Fossil
24 March – 23 April 2017 at FORMAT Photography Festival HABITAT

Beyond Drifting Artist Edition is held in the following collections:
Biblioteca della Fondazione Edmund Mach (Italy)
Duke University – Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Durham, NC)
LIBRIS (Stockholm, SE)
Pennsylvania State University Special Collections Library (USA)
Tufts University – Tisch Library (USA)