A Digital Studio of Groyne 76 on Bexhill Beach
How to celebrate 20 years of taking photographs of the groyne post tops on Bexhill beach? Intervention 2022 is a digital studio workshop in Mozilla Hubs that explores how Groyne 76 and I have changed over the last 20 years.
The Physical Pain
Intervention is my journey of embracing environmental forces to deal with and overcome the physical pain of a long-term illness. I was advised to keep a `pain journal’. However, I avoided writing about my health and instead drew images of a body – totems to illustrate my pain. I devised a scale of pain in my journal as a pattern to track my physical weakness. Numbers, not words, recorded my fatigue and the totem mapped the handling of my pain.
My illness made me disconnect. My refuge was to make myself go outside and seek some perspective. My place in a complex ecosystem made more sense than anything else. I sought reconnection with the rhythms of nature to escape the depression of constant pain and fatigue. I sought to control my pain by embracing the way change occurs rhythmically and slowly over time. The post tops became my obsession – to photograph, record, store and share. Each top became an individual with its recognisable features and position within a hierarchy. My dependable friends: I would go to the beach and it became my anchor point.
The Inter-tidal Zone
I can rationalise why the beach embodies a place of refuge, of recovery. Memories of childhood, of connection to nature: stories of temporal rhythms which stand outside our mechanical measurement of time. Walking Bexhill beach is an escape from the structures imposed upon who we are; it is time to consider and embrace change. The post tops make visible so many wonderful patterns of growth and erosion. They make visible interwoven patterns of change over time.
I became an amateur expert of each groyne post identifying the ferrule erosion, the lichen, and the barnacles and this took me out to the wider, infinitely complex, interconnectedness of our planetary ecosphere. There is a need for us all to reconnect with our planet and acknowledge our interdependence. We will not flourish or continue unless we identify our part in this living, evolving, network. The importance of spending time outside, of just being outside, has a positive impact on our physical and mental health. This knowledge is intrinsic and offers journeys of growth and self-exploration.
The Digital World
As a visual artist, fascinated by real and perceptual change, I embrace the blending of the digital and physical world as I change over time. Using Virtual Reality is about immersion, both visual and physical. A virtual world surrounds you and responds to your movement, creating a physical sense of being part of the environment. I am not recreating reality; you can see that this is not a real, analogue space, but to take a digital drawing of a seascape and wrap it around you in virtual reality and embrace the time to stand within an unreal landscape is exhilarating.
Abstraction is a tool to observe and explore reality. The environment itself and the objects within are abstract observations. I aim to create an abstract environment to focus on specific elements of our relationship with the boundary between land and sea. I am exploring our relationship with the edges where the land meets the sea; looking at its scale and complexity, its ability to reconnect us with our planet. It is also a reminder that this thing we call `reality’ is only a subset of the complexity surrounding us: reality is an abstraction.