Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals

"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