Under the Sea

The Crudlark Archive is an ongoing series of booklets documenting items from a collection of small plastic scraps amassed over many years.

Before the days of 3D printing and computer-aided design every piece of vacuum-molded plastic derived from an original, minutely-detailed, hand-sculpted model — a mind-boggling thought — and collecting these scraps celebrates this anonymous artistry.

I like pieces that show signs of age or damage and the beautiful faded colours of long exposure to light, and whose origin or purpose is a little mysterious — components of some unknowable mechanism, or, in the case of toys, a forgotten tribe of characters or storytale world.