Saltwater

These works explore the spaces between states: between waking and dreaming, immersion and emergence, stillness and transformation. A recurring teal-skinned figure moves through water, sky and night, inhabiting landscapes that are both physical and psychological. She is a shifting self: sometimes suspended, sometimes surrendering, sometimes poised at the edge of something unknown. Water becomes a threshold. The night sky becomes an interior space. Fish, moons, stars and clouds recur as fragments of a personal symbolic language, creating worlds in which the boundaries between body, landscape and imagination begin to dissolve. I’m interested in those moments when we are no longer who we were, but have not yet become whatever comes next. The figure exists within that in-between place - drifting, listening, descending and resurfacing.

Saltwater developed from my relationship with the coastal landscape near where I grew up. I have always been drawn to the idea of saltwater as something restorative: a place we return to for release, immersion and healing.

But the coastline I knew was never entirely benign. It was also a site of danger. Stingers and sharks inhabit the water, and many stretches of coast are effectively unswimmable because of powerful currents. The same landscape that invites you towards it can also repel you.

The works explore this tension between attraction and threat. Figures appear immersed in, suspended above or moving through watery environments that shift between the real and imagined. The ocean becomes both a physical landscape and a psychological space: somewhere to retreat, transform and recover, but also somewhere in which control can easily be lost.

Rather than resolving these opposing qualities, I am interested in allowing them to coexist. Beauty and danger, vulnerability and resilience, surrender and self-preservation sit alongside one another.

In Saltwater, the sea is never simply a backdrop. It is an active presence - seductive, unpredictable and indifferent, and the figures exist in an uncertain relationship with it.

You may also like