S E A

A reflective skin. A shadow twin. A flipping coin. 'We say like or as and the world is a fish minted in silver and alloy.'* A thick mist climbs down the hill slowly engulfing the land as it goes – definitions between earth and sky and sea and me dissipating the longer I stay in the water, I watch the imposing mass fade to pale nothingness.

*Eavan Boland, House of Shadows. Home of Simile.

Forming two thirds of the surface of the earth, somehow we ignore the infinite depths of the ocean.

Bacteria, protists, algae, plants, fungi, and animals all call the sea a home. It offers a myriad of marine habitats and ecosystems. Ranging vertically from the sunlit surface and shoreline to the great depths and pressures of the cold, dark abyssal zone, and in latitude from the cold waters under polar ice caps to the colourful diversity of coral reefs in tropical regions. We all emerged from its salted depths.


Without it, life would not be sustained here, yet we largely ignore it. In the classic imperial mentality of modern man, we seek out new frontiers, flying to planets beyond our own in colonial missions of conquest. Rather than focus inward on the womb of Gaia, we embark on extractive exploitative journeys of expansion. Thrusting out into the Milky Way, disregarding the murky life filled cosmos contained within our own home.

Beneath the surface lies the longest mountain chain on this planet, contained within its depths are worlds that we can barely conceive of. 94% of the world's living species exist here, 70% of our oxygen is produced by it. We toy with its top, skim its surface. We have only discovered 5 % of it.

'Corals of the seas and lichens of the land also bring us into consciousness of the Capitalocene, in which deep-sea mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding.'

Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: 56

Cursed by Poseidon, Odysseus sails an almost endless journey to Ithaca.
The gods have made him invisible, so nearly swallowed by the sea.




Swelling currents of salted storms



Batter upon my body, like a ship



My bough is drowned



My sails ripped



I am certain now, I will not be found

we are formed of fallen stars but we are also sea and salt and stone

In 1969, American zoologist Robert Paine coined the term trophic cascade in response to a phenomenon he had witnessed in his research. Concerned with the study of ecosystems, Paine proposed the term in relation to a study he had conducted in kelp forests, where he removed predatory starfish from experimental plots along the Pacific Northwest coast. Mussels provided one of the main food sources for the starfish, where they shared the habitat with 17 other species. After just three year, this number had reduced to 7 as mussels had begun to take over the environment, crowding out many other species. By the end of the study, Paine had produced essentially a monoculture. Research continued and by the 1990s it was clear that the trophic cascade was a real and measurable phenomenon. To remove or change any part of the food chain, the entire chain will be affected. Make specifically critical changes, and the entire chain will collapse.

Darwin suggested that studying the organisms of the deep sea produces specimens of ‘living fossils’ from an evolutionary past as life there may have remained unchanged. Going deeper is going back in time.

'The mountaineer, obsessed with summits, treats the world in much the same way, as its own model, but this time at full-scale, calculating altitudes in relation to a base notionally fixed at sea-level. Thus all ground is above-ground, since the ground itself – the solid base on which all else is supposed to rest – turns out to be none other than the fluid ocean. Even this sea is an artifice, however, since real seas, as every mariner knows, heave and swell, their levels rising and falling with the tides.'

Tim Ingold, Lines: 40

Thick rays slice through blue, luminous panes, glowing sails
Down to the sand deck. Bubbles bloom and float toward me
Crystals of air. Clouds of glistening solidity.
Beneath - black bodies, tanked backs, wide reflective eyes.