Seaward Bound

At first glance, these photographs appear to offer a stripped-back seascape: a pale, featureless sky above a dark plane whose muted shimmer suggesting a distant sea. Yet the image never fully settles into that reading. Something in the texture feels too even, too close; the horizon a little too sharp. The image holds the tension between landscape and surface, an uncanny stillness that suggests the sea while resisting it. The title hints at what the photograph withholds. The “sea” is in fact the textured cover of a book, photographed at a shallow angle so that material briefly masquerades as horizon and tide.

The work emerged during my Leverhulme Trust residency at the University of Hull, where I encountered the city’s whaling histories primarily through books—objects that became my passage into an industry long past. In the dim light of Blaydes House reference-only library, their covers sometimes reminded me of the ocean as I have seen it from the distance of an airplane window: a solid, unmoving surface, thick as leather. These images rest in that slippage, where the act of looking turns archives into seascapes, and where the truth of the photograph cannot be revealed not by sight alone.

Printed on Kodak Metallic paper, 100 x 125 cm (framed size)
Limited Edition of 3 + 1a/p