SHOAL is a photography exhibition by Mandy Barker at Great North Museum: Hancock that shows marine plastic debris.

The work in this show focuses on plastics collected and photographed from trawls and net samples at various points between Japan and Hawaii, and also from the tsunami affected shoreline in Fukushima Prefecture. Each image includes a different trawl sample, in some cases represented as tiny plankton, and captioned with the grid reference of where each sample was collected. Each image is based on a collection of marine plastic that forms a 'shoal', arrangements of different species of fish that the plastic ultimately affects. Objects and particles have been duplicated to represent both the scale of lives lost and the amount of plastic that entered the Pacific Ocean as a result of the Tohoku earthquake and Japanese Tsunami.

SHOAL, until 2 November, Great North Museum: Hancock, www.northeastmuseums.org.uk/greatnorthmuseum