Mapping edges of the sea.
A practice of wandering and mapping the edges of the sea:
Gazing outwards at the sea, the ocean becomes a poem without words. The repetition of the waves breaking on the beach, rhythmically, followed by a motion of water withdrawing back into the large masses of sea. The edges between water and land become clearer and sharper as the water quickly evaporates leaving the sand moist. The motion of walking along the edges of the sea, the poem appears along the edge between water and land. Poetic fragments or records on paper. A language is visible. Each drawing revealing different qualities and characteristics. The drawings are written by the sea, and by the motion of walking along its edges. The drawings and installations are glimpses of an incomplete narrative, an offering, or an unfolding narrative, it is an unending process.
The drawings exist, side by side, as fragments of language, of the visible and invisible. They exist as a form of language; a form of the sea. What are these forms? What is the language of the sea?
Returning to the edges of the sea, the process comtinues. Texts of the visible and invisible. The in-between spaces of existence. Who owns the voice of the sea? The drawings and installations work as a trace, a poem, the sea reminds the viewer of the unfolding narrative. The outlines of human figures are dissolving as black mass.
Reminded of the news I read 24 days ago from today's current date. 70 people missing outside of Libya trying to cross by boat to Malta. From January to September 2021 1369 people drowned crossing the Mediterranean.
A struggle exists within the drawing. Someone, somewhere has disappeared . The boat refugees have disappeared and continue to disappear. Thousands in numbers per year. As the sea reveals a language of the visible and invisible forces of nature. Poems of loss and struggle, of belonging . A dialog of belonging that stretches beyond limitations of the sea's edges, it stretches beyond, into a revelation of human tragedy and encountering. An urgency to try and build a "home". What has happened to the refugees who never were found crossing the sea? Where did their homes go? How do we understand "home"? A home is a fragile structure, it can disappear. The waves erase traces of home. The sea reflects our vulnerability and fragility of existence.
(disappeared)/ sea drawing/ink on recycled paper/2021
(somewhere, someone), sea drawing , ink on recycled paper, 2021
The Ice Ship by Sue Hubbard
All night it is day.
Glycerine shadows fuse sea and sky into something indivisible.
Hoar-frost and snow mingle with hail.
This is the end of the inhabitable world we are so far north.
Snow-clad mountains spit fire, icebergs drift
in a boiling swell piercing the pale sun in its net of frosty air.
We have been at sea for days.
Ice-cold, iron-cold, our lungs tense against the razor chill, it could be the moon we are so distant from ourselves.
Dreaming and loving here are the same hunger
as we wander in watery exile, storm-beaten
by perishing winds.
Ahead the glacial hull looms
spectral in the crushing heaves of pack-ice,
trapped like a fisherman’s float in the mouth of a silver carp.
Tattered sails, fragments of mast, poke from their crystal coffin like splintered whale-bone trepanning the empty heart of blue.
For thirteen years they have waited, penitent
as glass angels, black lips welded to alabaster tongues,
untold tales frost-bitten in their throats.
Alone at his log the Captain holds patient vigil
awaiting a huff of divine breath.
So far from home we glide directionless
beneath the bald sun through cerulean ice-fields, past glacial slabs too cold even for sea birds, as grievous and exhausted we give ourselves up to what we’ve become.
