15th March 2023
Dear Joe, Ástriður and Hildur,
Narrowing in the selection of what will travel with me, I’m sending you through an initial list of works.
I have 14 envelopes, each containing all the sea glass found on a given day. For a time, these envelopes of glass have been accumulating on my windowsill. I thought that they might be something that I could use as small material textures in an arrangement, or transformed and combined with other materials to produce a new object. These pieces of glass are not objects without context but the only context I know of is connected to the moment that they were discovered and removed from that situation. An act that marked the end of a journey. An end of a journey that told little of how it began. Working off the assumption that it’s impossible for all waves to reach all corners of the sea’s frontiers and that nothing can travel everywhere and because nothing can therefore travel everywhere, so only specific somethings arrive. I’ve spent time looking into their origin, looking into movement of water within the Baltic Sea system, and compiling a list of possible places where they might have met the sea for the first time.
A duration of distance and a question of what must be happening during the separation; the relationship between beginning and ends and how much the middle has to do with it all. You catch me in a moment where I find myself in the position, dwelling on the thought of how much of where I want to go aligns with where I’ve come from - metaphorically speaking about art making. I’ll anchor the explanation onto an observation and go on from there.
When you lie on your back on a day without clouds and look up at the sky you can see a gradient of blue radiating out from the centre of the area you are looking at. Sometimes it is darker at the centre and sometimes it is lighter. Lying on the beach in Estonia I noticed this gradient was the inverse to what I’ve seen in Australia. It’s in this moment it’s possible to begin to understand that you are at the centre of this world, that it is round and that you are a part of this complex system. Yet despite this, in this single moment there is just a colour field and a phenomena of the system dissolving in on itself, into one’s self, and one’s self in turn dissolves into the system; all entities involved co-becoming.
So; this open thought that I’m reckoning with, concerns the idea that artworks could co-become in landscape, and thus situate [themselves] empathetically to the systems that they are presented in, systems that their being emerges from, systems they might maintain connection to. For me this suggests that there needs to be some kind of a recalibration of production and presentation to be simultaneous to each other and the present. Yet this is at odds with how I’ve worked in the past; mulling over memories, turning material over in my mind until or after a shift occurs where I feel this material could be transformed.
I often think of my projects as being catalysed by experiences, observation and artefacts. Encounters set narratives in motion and generate into larger investigations, and systematically or haphazardly amass collections networked together. The initial encounter (for example the sea glass) then becomes a framework from which a project might develop. These encounters don’t end the preparation work because the encounters always persist into the artworks, dictating what decisions are made and how the material is negotiated throughout the production process. Always thinking back in order to move forward. Not necessarily existing at the threshold between before and after, but kind of and at the same time not quite.
It seems that falling into place is an opportunity to bring together my collection of things that are not yet indicative of, both connected and disconnected to something other than the thing that it is but something intrinsically bound to it. Things that exist in the threshold between before and after, between the beginning and the end. A collection of not-quite-s from the threshold space as I begin to map out ways of thinking how to reconcile what I think I want to do and what I have been doing. Hoping that floating between two thoughts still means it’s possible to focus on one.
Does this say too much about what it is?
Looking forward to seeing you soon.
With love from Sophie