catandcoat

For 'Beach Findings' I had collected a lot of litter from the beaches around Morecambe Bay, and used some of it when making collagraphs for the book. I experimented with using some of the remaining litter to produce soft-ground etchings.

I scanned the resulting prints and produced this book at a reduced scale. I also revised a poem from 'Beach Findings' so that it was much shorter so that there is a short verse to go with each of 10 prints.

Beachcombing -Ten Steps

Step 1
A white plastic fork, undamaged;
A navy-blue wrapper, torn and scoured back
To the white inner layer.

A broken plastic lid and a strip of green plastic
Like a piece of lurid liquorice.

Step 2
An empty plastic husk; its thin crushed folds,
Ravaged and ripped, its colours bleached.
I tease open the laminations -
Letting it fall into shreds -
And dissect the broken stripes
Of an abandoned Union Jack.

Step 3
A white plastic ice-cream spoon,
Flat and waisted like an egg timer,
Nestles against a curled aluminium ring pull.

Two cigarette butts lie at my feet,
And a lost golf ball,
Indented with dozens of pockmarks.

Step 4
A length of bright green string,
Unravelling,
Into skeins and snares
For the feet of foraging birds;
And one blanched woven rope,
From a sailing boat.

Step 5
A small ruptured plastic sheet,
Stabbed with holes.
Disintegrating granules discolour the sand
With oil-slick pigments;
Misplaced deposits, pulverised by the waves
Into meteoric detritus.

Step 6
A section of yellow plastic,
Chewed and ground by the waves,
Spat out, indigestible.

A geode of blue plastic,
Now obdurate, solidified lava.
One drinking straw with a red stripe,
And a ridged section at the curve,
Like a worm.

Step 7
A piece of white plastic,
So compressed and eroded,
It seems part of a jawbone,
From a small mammal,
With holes where teeth have fallen out.

Step 8
Lots of little tubes -
Orange, lavender, blue and white -
Cotton bud holders;
Sluiced down the toilet, piped out to sea,
To float back to the shore.

A Diet Coke bottle, lid still on,
Half full, the liquid gleaming
A strange pale amber-orange;
Inside the bottle, the dew of condensation.

Step 9
A sliver of red plastic,
From a smashed pen,
A broken elastic band,
Limp and exhausted,
And the handle of a plastic spade
Are carefully placed with a pile of sticks
Within a circle of stones, as if for a fire.

Step 10
A tiny ball, like a little round egg,
Seamed round the middle,
With fractured holes each side,
Broken open by a seabird
Looking for a meal.

Ten paces;
Litter all the way.