SPINNING AWAY (2023)
These are not things as they are, but things as they are over time. These are changes in a constantly shifting landscape - a place subject to some of the highest tides in the world. The tides are the river breathing - inhale, exhale, temporary water. The moon moves over us, dragging the oceans as the earth spins through them and so we pass through high and low. We are spinning in space, but we do not feel it - these waters prove that we are as they surge to catch up.
High tides rise and fall twice daily, submerging and revealing that which is neither land nor sea. Time works differently here, it floods and ebbs, showing itself in depths, currents and flows. That time - its cycles and rhythms - is older than our clocks. Primal processes on repeat, a link between the local and the celestial.
Moon-time, lunar-rhythm. A handful of minutes and saltmarsh becomes sea, the water rises and waves erase the footprints left by Curlew as they probed in the mud. Then the ebb - the birds return, the plants gather their light before the flood comes again. To live in such a place you must embrace change and act accordingly.
These are shaping forces. Attune yourself to transformations. Sit and watch the tides and they will act upon you too. Gravity carving runnels in the mud, scouring the riverbed. Washed. Picked clean. Held by gravity - debris, sand, silt. Lifted, suspended, deposited. Movements that leave traces.
The mud is an archive, it was land once and holds the past in its depths, its surface an index - of falling water that is no longer there - gravity written into the substrate. A glistening past. It is both what it is, and what it has been.
- Severn Estuary, 2023
*All photographs produced on 4x5" without human intervention or digital manipulation.