Tag: sea
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The Decomposition of Cetaceans
Working as a whale-watching guide offers many perks. I get to see live whales regularly, photograph them, and share the joy of encountering these giants. Over the last two years I have dedicated much time to working with cetaceans in Húsavík, northern Iceland. But there is one thing that can dampen the experience for many…
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Hvalreki
Hvalreki is an installation piece, which explores and interrogates human relationships with whales through their residual bones. The work began through a personal interest in the history that links us humans to the mammals that inhabit the sea. It came about after spending four months in Húsavík, Northern Iceland; exploring the research done by whale…
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Red Snow
Albedo is the fraction of solar energy reflected from the Earth back into space. The word stems from Latin and means whiteness. Ice, with snow on top of it, has a very high albedo. Red snow describes an area of ice polluted, as it were, with red algae. Red algae is typically a mix of…
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Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE
Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong Tong Camping”, stained glass window panels of flip-flop frisbees, and the photo-puzzle of the Baccalaureate celebrations of naked boys on the beach: Varda’s new work…
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Scabies
We holidayed through its incubation. Time spent with family, the large, extended swell of us, in a rented house by a winter sea. What we shared that Christmas would burrow into our warm and secret places, causing us to begin a new year baffled by scratching. The yo-yo trips to doctors, all those different…
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A View from the Other Side
Spot-lit in the cavernous darkness, a model of a city. A model city: monotone, empty, pure, with the pristine edges of laser-cut steel glinting under light. It sits in the centre of an oil-black moat. The whole is perched waist-high on a slowly rotating table. Like many architectural models, the piece feels both large and…
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Lost in Fathoms
Stumbling dim across the surface of the earth: humanity. Our legacy not culture or religion or science, but ruin. Our lasting traces that of footprints, not brain waves. Is this what makes us unique? A geological force in our own right? Certainly this is the view announced in 2012 at the 34th International Geological Congress…
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The Story of a Single Rock
Like many stories, this one begins with a rock, in fact one rock amongst many: the shifting shingle which geographically defines and continually redefines the salt marshes of Orford Ness. When contemporary artist Anya Gallaccio made her first trip to the shingle spit of the Ness, it was not the accidental sculptures of wire and…
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Arkhipelagos
There is a sense of relief, upon leaving this exhibition, of being palpably bound up with pavement, sky and, a few short paces away, the murky heave and rush of the Thames with its welcome damp rising. A skeleton hull of a boat, displayed on the banks of the Thames, ghosts the space from which…
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She speaks
in a hoar frost, she said: the weather’s made a Miss Havisham’s wedding feast of this wood the dark of bark and leaf is cobwebbed over the hoar has clapped white hands over all those breathing mouths the air nests whitely in the trees and waits like birds like words to be…
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Shorelines Festival 2013
The perennial danger of the small town literary festival is that it takes place solely within the confines of a conference centre / tent / town hall or other academic / municipal space. However well-advertised, accessible (geographically, financially) and welcoming, there is always then a potential for division between inside and outside. This becomes pronounced…