Stuart Haygarth photographed objects he found during an epic hike along Britain’s coast. The results are strange and beautiful, says Robert Macfarlane

On first seeing Stuart Haygarth’s remarkable series of photographs, Strand, I was reminded of Roland Barthes’s line in a catalogue essay from 1976: “The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash.” Barthes meant, I think, that once an object has been discarded – and thus absolved of its function – its form becomes brightly visible. Freed from its status as commodity, and no longer treated in terms of its use-value, the thingness of an item intensifies as it “turns into trash”.

Certainly, one of the achievements of Haygarth’s works is to make strange again the mass-produced objects that fill our lives to the degree that we scarcely perceive them. In the past the Lancashire-born sculptor and designer has created works of art from used party poppers, spectacle lenses, and items confiscated from British Airways passengers. He is fascinated with recycling materials, and for Strand set out on a 450-mile walk along the British coast from Gravesend in Kent to Land’s End in Cornwall picking up man-made objects washed up on the shore along the way.