Photograph –  litter on Dun Canna beach (video to be uploaded shortly)

In total 90 people watched my presentation at Ullapool Museum this week 30 of them braving the Amber Weather warning which was in effect on Monday night for extreme rainfall, gale force winds and high tides. There reward was to be warmly welcomed by the museum staff and to be guided through my years investigation into the beach litter in the area.
Edited photographs and video clips summarised what you can observe on beaches not often cleaned. My residency on Isle Martin allowed me time to map in detail such a beach, the mapping information collected now awaits analysis. The photographic sequence of my activities pieced together the many strands of my enquiry process and I discussed the way that through working with many schools the lack of understanding of ‘how long plastic objects might last’ led me to make a timeline with the pupils and to create ‘ fossils’ which the children found and broke open and became the centre of the ‘Future Fossil Collection’ which has been on display this summer at the museum.
I explained how my love of sharing my work process made it easy to involve the many groups that the audience represented from schools, residents, waste services etc. The process of working together and on creating the artworks such as the ‘Litter Lines’ I hope was enjoyable even if the message was disturbing.

Visibility is a major aim of my project hence the reason I timed towing the ‘Litter Lines’ off Isle Martin to happen on World Environment Day and tried hard to get press coverage, writing up the event for local and regional press. I am still looking to get an article in a National  paper.

    
Everyone watched the 26 min presentation intently and at the end of my thanks to everyone, I shared how I want to

• use the images & information collected to create dramatic audio visual event that is projected onto harbour installations in ports along the coast, drawing attention to the litter found locally.
• Make installations and short films about particular types of plastic litter that I have found common in the Ross-shire area and which are not often highlighted in marine litter information i.e. melted plastic- gun caps – plastic fragments
• create an interactive litter map and a limited edition of litter identification cards
Audience questions & feedback ranged widely reflecting their shock at the volumes and types of litter found and their encouragement for me to continue to develop the project on and to return with further elements of the work.
  

On Wednesday morning 60 pupils & teachers from four of the schools involved took seats in the museum gallery with the suspended Golden Eagle exhibit flying down towards the ‘Littoral Exhibition & investigation space’ below. An exciting morning was had in the Museum by all, with much energy & discussion about litter and other Museum exhibits. A perfect conclusion to my work in the Museum this year, encouraging me to continue my links with the Museum and future possible work there. Thank you.

After an afternoon recording litter on Ullapool’s North East  Beach I am now sat in my van with my faithful companion Cal, previewing a  presentation of my years littoral journey  which I’m  projecting onto the rocking van walls – as gale force winds continue to blow onshore. The  driving rain and the crashing waves hitting the  Port A Bhaigh beach a few hundred metres away, are providing a dramatic additional sound track to the sequence of images I’m reviewing .

I hadn’t planned tonight’s  preview but it feels  serendipitous, as  the Port A Bhaigh  beach is where my story began in 2012 and where on a much calmer day in May this year I and many volunteers spent the afternoon filling over tens of  bags of rubbish. Thankfully the beach survey today in Ullapool recorded far less litter and our band of ten volunteers were glad only to be needing to fill 9 bags of litter  as the persistent south westerly showers hurled themselves at us throughout the afternoon.

This is the 2nd  Beachwatch survey we have carried out , the information we are collecting is going off to the Marine Conservation Society to add to the all important knowledge bank of what’s happening where .

Our hope is that next year Ullapool will be able to undertake the survey in the same week as the national & international Beach Watch event which takes place in  September. So please come along next autumn, even in the wild weather we all had a good afternoon and made new friends keen on looking after our environment. Many thanks to Tom , Debbie, Sara, Lesley, John, Ron, Rowen, Ellen   & Maria for coming along.

My presentation of  littoral event images  over the past year will be taking place on Monday night at Ullapool Museum  7.30pm. Everyone is welcome , your feedback will be much appreciated. Thanks to Black Reiver Consultancy for the loan of the pocket projector.

This weeks momentous movement of activism in Scotland has continued with collective actions both on the streets and on the beaches!

As I joined thousands of people on the Princes Street in Edinburgh today to demonstrate our collective  demands for political actions to be taken to stop climate change I was heartened by the knowledge that tens of thousands of people across the rest of  Europe and the world where also taking action on the streets to influence our politicians. The colourful,  witty explicit placards and costumes spoke volumes and few formal speeches were needed.

The messages on the placards also drew attention to issues of pollution and the need to take personal action to help our environment. This is exactly what about 50 people did yesterday  on Cramond beach as together we took part in the  2014 Beach Watch weekend organised by the Marine Conservation Society  (MCS) as part of the national and international monitoring of the state of our beaches.

Cramond Beach has many important memories for me  as its the beach  I launched my first Crowd Funding appeal for my project and where  I was first instructed in the MCS’s  very detailed, internationally accepted method of beach litter surveying .  Yesterday I joined the ‘political action’ on the beach and teamed up with local residents Claire and Oliver who were also returnees to the surveying, together we made up one of the 10 teams that scrutinised a ten metre section of 100m of the beach carefully marked out.

As we slowly zigzaged our way down the beach from the hightide line to the low water mark , we quickly fell into discussing the particular litter problem that this beach suffers from and that has been witnessed here on successive years of surveys  that is the vast amounts of sanitary cloths. The ‘cloths’  we find are some kind of mixed cotton and plastic fibres we think they could be some form of changing  or incontinence pads. At first they are almost  imperceptible as they are matted in with the sand and only a few fibres poke through the surface, but as usual you soon become adept at spotting the ‘cloths’. The pads were duly pulled out of the seaweed and sand and bagged up.  Our team collected 310 pieces of the pads/cloths in our 10m stretch of beach. The questions are echoed in each  survey team – where do they all come from ? Have they been dumped at sea? Are the coming down the sewage system? The MCS suggested that the reason for this amount of sanitary litter is that the cost of collection of this sort  waste by sanitary disposal companies is so much that homes/institutions  keep on flushing them down the toilets, reaching the beach  through the storm drains which don’t all have filters ?

After the group tally of  107kg of litter collected in the survey area, I take one of my own strandline walks where I note down everything I see.  I decided to exclude the cloths from my list as I had seen enough in the sand and caught between the stones on the storm drain stream and I  concentrate just on litter that had product names :
Mars – Iron Bru – Castol Oil – Maltesers – Sinsbury’s – Kellogs – Strathmore Water – Pot Noodles – Coke a cola – Asda – Co-op –Milkyway – Tesco

So my overriding memory of Cramond  Beach on Beach Watch day was of Product Wrapers and sanitary pads! But by the end of the clean up action Cramond Beach was much cleaner  over 300kg of litter had been removed through the mornings  ACTIVISM !

I am parked up in my post office van which is transformed from litter collection & sorting space to my mobile project ‘Office’, were I sit whenever I can grab a several hours to write up my littoral notes taken during my residency on Isle Martin mapping the litter washed up .

May 2014: collection & sorting                                     August 2014:  writing & planning

It’s a strange feeling to be writing about beaches on the  North West coast, while sat in my office surrounded by forests  hundreds of miles south and about as far from the sea as I can possibly be. My location , like most people, is determined by where I am contracted to work, for me that means designing and facilitating paid art projects and at the moment that’s in the borders and Midlothian. But my many notebooks and photographs always travel with me and I am determined to try and write an article that documents my findings so far and what is being done by thousands of individual people to improve the situation we find on our shorelines.

As I reconnect with my statistics of litter found on Isle martin’s back beach I am transported back to the west coast, the feeling of awe at the beauty of the place, sadness and disgust at what I am now after a year tracking the litter on such beaches used to seeing. Browsing through hundreds of images capturing heaps of rope and plastic objects  my passion and desire to creatively show what’s to a greater or lesser extent on every beach around Scotland, the UK and across the globe  is quickly ignited and I begin to write…. If anyone has any contacts in papers /publications in Scotland or UK, that they think might be interested in the ‘Littoral Story’  please leave a message below.

My immediate intention is to return to Ullapool with a visual presentation of the ‘Littoral Story- the pictures so far’. The presentation will be shown at the Ullapool Museum to coincide with the  last few weeks of my  ‘Future Fossil Collection’ installation there.  I will show images documenting all the events that have taken place over the last year on the beaches around Ullapool and on Isle Martin and I will be shedding light on the back stories behind the ‘fossils’, tracking oranges, CSI teams on Ullapool beaches, and skiff teams towing hundreds of metres of litter across Loch Kinnaird on World Environment Day. Dates for the showing will be announced shortly.