I am the Ocean, you are the sky.
During a four-week residency on King Island, I became absorbed by the sea and the stories held along its shores. The weather was wild, the winds relentless, and the landscape extraordinarily beautiful. I walked the coastline gathering shells, bones and fragments of old pipes, drawn to the small things left behind or returned by the tide. Alongside these objects, I gathered stories. Stories of ships broken against reefs, of journeys interrupted, and of people who came within sight of land but never reached it. In 1845, the Cataraqui struck a reef less than a hundred metres from shore. Four hundred people died. Many were families travelling towards the possibility of a new life. A decade earlier, the Neva had been wrecked near the island, carrying women convicts and children whose journeys had been shaped by very different circumstances. Standing on that coastline, I found the distance between sea and shore difficult to comprehend. Such a small stretch of water could hold everything between survival and loss. I thought about the people aboard those ships: what they carried, whom they loved, what they feared, and what they imagined waited for them beyond the voyage. These histories began to mingle with my own imaginings. Mythological creatures emerged in my mind, alongside glimpses of past lives and worlds beneath the surface. The shells, bones and weathered fragments I collected became starting points for work that moved between the tangible and the imagined. I was drawn to their worn surfaces, their strangeness, and the unanswered questions they carried. This collection grew from that meeting of place, history and imagination. It holds my wonder at the island’s beauty, but also the unease that came with knowing something of its past. Through these works, I return to the shoreline: to what washes up, what disappears, and what we find ourselves imagining when the sea offers only fragments.
