Nurdles + Chessboard (2026)

Black + White Photograph

This piece is a take on the ancient math story about the Rice and Chessboard and the power of exponential growth. There are many versions of the tale but one goes like this: a King promises a wiseman rice that doubles on each square of the chessboard (i.e. 1 piece on square 1, 2 on square 2, 4 on square 3, 8 on square 4 etc). Initially, the growth is manageable: by square 10, it is 512. By square 64, it is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (18 quintillion). The King is unable to fulfil his promise as there isn’t enough rice.

On 19th July 2026, following a collision between a vessel and a container ship, one billion plastic nurdles (approximately 25 tonnes) were released into the River Tyne. The nurdles photographed, all 1020 (30g), are what I collected and represents a mere millionth of what was dropped in this one isolated ‘environmental disaster’. Fidra estimates 445,000 tonnes of plastic pellets are lost every year around the world: how many more billions of these nurdles can really be produced and lost to the environment before the damage is too great?