Tide Songs
Tide Songs is a piece of work that developed out of long walks taken into the inter-tidal landscapes in and around London. Coastal landscapes are strange and fascinating; constantly shifting and timeless, casting up fragments of medieval pottery and neolithic flints alongside fishing nets, endless splinters of plastic waste and chunky 90’s mobile phones. The silt shifts to reveal the root systems of ancient forests, the blackened oak stumps felled seemingly yesterday by bronze axes, endless styrofoam beads swirling around them.
Time passes differently on the foreshore, and as my collection of artefacts began slowly growing, my walks became increasingly ritualised - part psychogeography, part meditative-archaeology. Time to think. I felt very strongly that something was continuously drawing me back to these spaces; the walks were dream-like, strangely surreal, the hypnotic rolling crunch of the tide unfurling each little find that caught my eye. It seemed like the tiny objects I returned with retained something of this obliquely numinous quality about them (everyone I shared them with would feel a particular affnity with at least one object) and I noticed that people around me felt not only drawn to them, but often had far more emotional experiences interacting with them than they were expecting. It seemed as though each shard had become a relic that had absorbed a residual trace of another time, something that people could sense, even if only fleetingly.
Tide Songs has become a portable archive of finds, which continues to visit museums and art institutions across the country, incorporating many finds from coastlines around Britain. It has been displayed in several formats, from public discussions in gallery spaces to interactive installations and performance pieces, but with a consistent emphasis on the availability and tactility of the objects themselves - on the importance of the audience being able to hold and interact with them physically. Underpinned by my broader research in folklore, technology and history, Tide Songs is an exploration of archives and collections as media, and has continued to develop and evolve alongside my wider practice, through collaborations with the public, academics and (in particular) with curators.
Tide songs has also been developed into an interactive instrument, using custom written software and hardware to transform each artefact into a MIDI-input, which can be used (like a piano key) to play different notes in a tonal, interactive field-recorded soundscape.
