Every... Snowflake is Different

As production boomed from the 1950s, plastic was viewed as a miracle material that would transform society. Yet the optimism people first felt toward plastics subsided in the 1970s and was undermined by the oil crisis and growing environmental awareness. By the 1980s, plastic carrier bags, for example, had become a highly visible problem, clogging up landfill, drifting through city streets and blighting rural landscapes. Culturally, plastic became a synonym for everything cheap, fake and hollow in what was understood as a declining consumer society. Today, the average European bins 34 kilos of plastic each year, much of it after just one use. No surface of the Earth is free from it, from the deepest ocean to the highest mountaintop. As part of what has been dubbed the Anthropocene era, it may also be said that our age is the plastic age. Mandy Barker’s work comments on the ubiquity and longevity of plastic waste. A plastic bag takes 20 years to decompose. A drinking straw, 200. A bottle, 500. As they disintegrate, they shed microplastics that penetrate everywhere, threatening life. Around 10 % of European plastics are recycled. Most go to landfill, and eventually end up in the ocean. Roughly a garbage truck of plastic washes into the sea every minute. ‘EVERY... Snowflake is Different’ shows a suspended array of plastic collected off the coast of a Yorkshire nature reserve during two visits made to the site. Encompassing toys, medical waste and straws, among other things, it is a potent representation of the negative consequences of plastic waste and pollution.