After focusing on taking precise photographs  of 40 different objects individually, for the Guide to Beach Litter,  I decided  to take a few sessions  selecting out objects to combine together  to create a series of simple ‘still life’ images …..

…… positioning objects together quickly suggested narrative ideas

‘flipflop trailing plastic rocks’ and ‘Syringe resting on ‘plastic rock’

These simple still life’s put me in mind of Eileen Agar’s surrealist assemblages in particular her     ‘Marine Object’ 1939 (below right), in which she assembled a natural rock, horn and star fish.

Inspired I set about making my own ‘Marine Object’  using three different beach litter objects I found on beaches this year – ‘rocks’,  fishing line and a spoon. The significant difference being that they are all plastic and require no specialist conserving .

Working in the littoral zones I have frequently felt like I was inhabiting a  surreal dream/nightmare landscape not dissimilar to Dali’s ‘Mountain Lake’ or  ‘The Persistence of Memory’. Melted plastic bags could quite easily replace the slumped clock over the branches of the tree  in the Memory landscpae

With such thoughts in mind the simple ‘still life’s’ quickly developed into sets and introducing my architectural models the surrealist ideas of playing with shifting scale,  introducing distortion to create confusion and tension all came  flooding into my notes.  Useful ideas which I intend to use in my animation over the next year.

   
Photographs taken in the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop July 2015