I started making Horses of the Anthropocene after discovering that in the surrounding farmland where I live and work there is a layer of the soil that is impregnated with thousands of pieces of fragmented decaying plastic. This is the result of a decade old composting scheme, run by the local council which collected garden and food waste which was made into compost and then sold to farmers to spread on their land.

Unfortunately at no stage in this process did anyone notice, nor do anything about the large amount of plastic that had been placed in the compost collection bins along with the garden and food waste before it was spread on the land over hundreds of acres.

This September, ten years later when the fields were ploughed, this Anthropocenic layer of disintegrating fragmenting plastic has risen to the surface.

The Horses of the Anthropocene are made as a comment on this situation. They are being made using materials gathered from the land: locally dug clay reinforced with plastic fragments, straw and paper found when walking in the surrounding fields. The materiality of the horses is a reflection on how the nature of farming has changed over the last eighty years, when heavy horses were still used to work the land, before the mass industrialisation of Agriculture.