BENEATH THE WAVES

 

Living beside the English Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, I am continually aware of the sea as presence and force: economic engine, political threshold, ecological system and site of myth. Beneath the Waves explores how we attempt to comprehend something that exceeds us, tracing the entangled languages of mathematics, mapping, and storytelling through which we construct meaning around the ocean.

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Beneath the Waves began as a commission for a new hospital on the south coast of England, with the brief to create a reflective space connected to the local seas. Through that process, the work evolved into an enquiry into how we make sense of the ocean, through mathematics, mythologies, mapping and representation.The work moves between surface, edge and depth. Many images attend to the water’s surface - the shifting plane where trade, migration, conflict and labour unfold - yet beneath these transient waves lie geological strata, tidal mechanics and marine ecologies that resist direct visibility. Diagrammatic overlays, cartographic fragments and mathematical formulae are inscribed into the photographic field, functioning as visual annotations rather than illustrations. A spring tide diagram, a horizon-distance calculation, a Fibonacci sequence derived from a common whelk shell: these systems sit alongside long-exposure seascapes and coastal architectures, mapping invisible forces onto visible form.

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More info about the original comission can be found here.

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