'Litter Art': Photographer Frank Tomlinson Turns Discarded Rubbish Into A Bassetlaw Museum Exhibition

A new photography exhibition at Bassetlaw Museum in Retford takes one of the most quietly demoralising features of any country drive — the volume of litter strewn along the edges of roads and lay-bys — and reframes it as fine art. Photographer Frank Tomlinson, known for his documentary work on industrial Northern England, has been collecting discarded items, photographing them in detail, and presenting them as a record of an environmental issue that he says he "could no longer ignore". The free exhibition runs until Saturday 18 July 2026.

How the exhibition came about

The artist behind the exhibition, Frank Tomlinson, has built his career on fine art and commercial photography, including a documentary body of work capturing the industrial North of England. The Litter Art series began, by his account, on a walk along a road, when he noticed a drinks can that had been driven over so many times it was almost fused into the tarmac.

Tomlinson took the can home and photographed it. The form it had taken, he says, became the starting point for an ongoing project: collecting other discarded items he found in lay-bys and adjacent woodland, and presenting each one in close-up. The aim, in his own framing, is to raise awareness of the volume of rubbish being dumped along Britain's rural road network and to document the damage being caused to the environment.

What the museum says

Kasia Wosiak, Collections Officer at Bassetlaw Museum, said Tomlinson's work was unlike anything the museum had previously shown, and that it "challenges us, in the best possible way, to think about our relationship with the environment".

She added that the images are "both unsettling and beautiful" — that the close attention paid to each individual discarded object becomes a way to surface the broader environmental challenges the images are pointing to.

The local context

Roadside fly-tipping and casual littering are persistent issues across Bassetlaw, as they are across most rural English districts. Verges along the A1, A57, A60 and the smaller roads connecting the villages all collect rubbish — from drinks cans and food packaging to bigger fly-tipped loads. Bassetlaw District Council's environmental and licensing teams handle the larger fly-tipping cases through enforcement (including, in some cases, prosecution and fines), while volunteer litter-picking groups operate across multiple villages.

Frank Tomlinson's exhibition lands as a different kind of intervention — an attempt to make litter visible by treating each piece as a subject worth photographing rather than as background noise to be ignored.

How to visit

Bassetlaw Museum is at Grove Street in Retford town centre, a short walk from Retford railway station. The Litter Art exhibition runs until Saturday 18 July 2026. The museum is open four days a week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday between 10am and 4:45pm. It is closed Mondays and Thursdays except during school holidays. Admission is free.

More information on the museum and its upcoming exhibitions is on the Bassetlaw Museum website.

Source: Bassetlaw District Council — New exhibition reimagines litter into art, 29 May 2026.