Sea Signatures
DESCRIPTION
A collection of works started in 2017 and made predominantly by using the cyanotype process in collaboration with the coastal landscape.
In common with many people who have lived their lives in close proximity to the sea, I experience a slight sense of claustrophobia when inland for more than a few days – a strange feeling that something isn’t quite right in my world – and I am drawn back to the coast.
It has always been the littoral landscape that has inspired me most creatively and which I feel compelled to explore visually - those dynamic areas of coastline encompassing dune systems, the intertidal zone and the nearshore parts of the sea. A place where tides wash over layers of rocks laid down through the millennia, and where sands are re-sculpted daily by wind and wave.
My home, at the tip of the Wirral peninsula in North West England, lies a stone’s throw from the shore. This part of the UK coastline is a place of shifting sands, estuarine mudflats and tidal islands. Wide, expansive beaches spread out for miles. From time to time the sea seems to disappear in the west.
Most days, I make my way across these ochre sands, over the wrack line to the water’s edge. I have become familiar with the tidal patterns, observing the ebb and flow – reassuring constants during turbulent times.