Whitsands Bay

This afternoon we took advantage of the weather and drove over to Torpoint to Whitsands Bay. We wanted to go to a beach because after yesterday's beach clean at Mount Edgecumbe we wanted to try to find some litter ourselves and to also have some time to photograph for tests of our final images.

When we got to Whitsands it was very sunny which did make my exposure go a bit funny in some of my images but I tried to set the camera up the best I could for the natural lighting we had. It was quite a trek down to the beach so we had to stop on our way down to catch our breathes and to also take some pictures of the scenery.

We got down to the beach and started to take some pictures of the beach and what we could see on the beach. At first we couldn't see any rubbish in sight but once we had walked a bit further along the beach we soon saw piles of rubbish near a cove of rocks. When I first saw the rubbish it looked as if someone had already sorted the rubbish off the beach and put it up there to be out of the way and ready to collect. We had been set a task of building a sculpture with rubbish that we found as we weren't in college this afternoon. As soon as we started to collect the rubbish and started building a sculpture a man came over to us and asked us if we were doing a beach clean. We replied and said that we weren't today but had done yesterday and that this was part of our project for college. Yesterday in our lecture we spoke about an organisation called the Rame Peninsula Group. The Rame Peninsula Group are people who go to beaches around the Peninsula and collect all the rubbish and make artwork out of them to try to make an impact of people to show what rubbbish is doing to sea creatures. The man that came over to us was someone who is a member of the Rame Peninsula Group. The man said to us that he had come previously and sorted all of the rubbish out into piles. He was focusing on the orange and the reds that have been washed up because he said that sea creatures are drawn more towards plastic that is red and orange because they mistake the plastic for shrimps. He collected his piles of orange and went to another part of the beach and created some artwork out of the oranges. Once he had finished we went back over to him and asked if we could photograph what he had done. It was an unbelievable experience to just bump into someone who is part of our research that we are doing for this project.

After we had bumped into the man from Rame Peninsula we started to collect rubbish in order for us to create a 3D sculpture on the beach. We had been set the task of creating a sculpture as we weren't in college this afternoon. When we couldn't see any rubbish on the beach we started to think that we wouldn't be able to make a sculpture and would have to do it in our own time and then when we finally saw the piles of rubbish we were able to make our sculpture. We saw a piece of wood that had been placed into the sand vertically so thought that we could make a sculpture of a person out of rubbish.

We found a black pole that we could use for arms and got some strings that we used to tie the pole to the wood. We then found a pile of string that we used as hair for our person and a helmet that we put on top of the hair. At first we found a black trainer that we used for one foot but we unfortunately couldn't find another shoe at that time so I found a bleach bottle to use as another shoe. After our sculpture was nearly complete some of us went exploring up to another little rock and saw some more rubbish up there and found a welly! We then got rid of the bleach bottle that was part of our sculpture and replaced it with the welly which meant that our sculpture had two right feet but it's artwork.