Mandy Pattullo

Last year, Hannah Lamb led an insightful Cyanotype workshop for the Textile Study Group, encouraging us to explore sun-printing techniques on fabric. It has been inspiring to see how that weekend continues to spark new creative directions among our members. Here, Mandy shares her latest piece—a powerful response to a local environmental crisis.

Nurdle

A nurdle is a tiny plastic pellet the size of a lentil. In July 2026  up to a billion of these were released into mouth of the river Tyne after a boat collision at the Port of Tyne. This was a major ecological disaster with up to a billion nurdles  being washed up on our local north east  beaches  but also washing up as far away as Denmark, down the Yorkshire coast and up to Edinburgh. In terms of wild life birds eat them, can not digest them and starve because the nurdles fill their stomachs while not providing any nutrition. Fish are swallowing them too and so the whole food chain is affected.
This is my response to the disaster. 

Like other members of the Textile Study Group I fell in love with the cyanotype process introduced to us by Hannah Lamb but I felt that my experiments had to have some meaning. In this new piece of work I have collected, pressed and dried seaweed from Whitley Bay which is my nearest beach and one where I go to walk regularly. I printed with the seaweed in quite a watery splashy way. I can’t embroider a million plastic pellets but I have embroidered some trapped within the fronds of the seaweed which is where I encountered the nurdles though a team of volunteers picked up thousands when they first washed up. 

The textile measure 2.5 metres in length. Even more nurdles will be added in the winter months.