Plastic Particles In
My Testicles
Des particules de plastique dans mes testicules Plastic deeltjes in mijn testikels
Artist’s book/photobook/zine, 2025
Plastic particles in my testicles is a personal response to microplastics pollution in human bodies illustrated by plastic analogue positive film photography.
In a poem on the cover, I write how plastic particles are now everywhere in my body…‘in my testicles, in my lungs, in my liver, my kidneys, my stomach, my brain’.
Inside the book I ask, if photographs are made with plastics and plastics break down into microplastics…which find their way into human bodies, how much photography is inside of me?
Working with discontinued Fuji FP-100C Instant Colour Film I photographed skies and cloud formations, punctured and peeled positive prints and reclaimed negatives. Two photographs inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s drawing ‘Sorrow’, were shot on expired Polaroid 600 Instant Colour Film. These photographs and four wet plate collodion tintype self-portraits, ‘Becoming Plastic’, communicate my horror at my body becoming increasingly polluted with plastics, also linking the 1862 invention of plastic by Alexander Parkes to the 1851 invention of the wet plate collodion process by Scott Archer, both highly polluting and toxic. Black and white photogram prints made in the darkroom, ‘Base Laminated with Plastic on Both Sides’, emphasise the plastic content of contemporary Resin Coated photographic papers.
As pollution knows no borders the title appears in three languages: English, French and Dutch.
The book is printed on a glossy paper stock, the cover gloss-laminated with a plastic coating.
Size 21cm x 29.7cm, 36pp, stapled. Pages 170gsm, cover 300gsm. Published by Negative Press London, 7 May 2025. Printed in England
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