because they cannot lay an egg in the sea
“Precarity is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others…
What if precarity is the condition of our time?”
- Anna Tsing
‘because they cannot lay an egg in the sea’ is concerned with precarity and vulnerability in both the realm of the personal and the global. Drawing on direct experience of the natural world, and particularly the island shoreline, the exhibition combines sculpture, writing and the edible; submerged in the sensory.
Materials used are those which change state, behave unpredictably and demonstrate transitional processes; evaporation, crystallisation and clarity. These materials draw parallels with elemental beings, and the work explores reflection of and dialogue between the elemental and our mental and emotional states. Objects encountered at the shoreline are re-imagined and imbued with new narratives, accompanied by texts that draw on a personal narrative.
the fulmar
they nest because they cannot lay an egg in the sea
Battling the island's bare reveal
a cat licking themselves in a cold grass bed
concentrate on the bedraggled brown stems
strands of hair blowing in between my eyelashes
pouring coffee into your ears
the sea is a mat of hair moved by the wind
to squash gently on the tongue
giving sand in between rivulets flowing forward
to sink into slight, unstable ground
heat of the open fire on my soles
holding a warm bannock to my lips, a
pillow leaving flour fragments
like Luskentyre on your cheek
touching custard flesh with the pads
of fingers a skin-like solid
fog in the blue hour
whispering in your ear like an electric cable
in the imagined archipelago
Bedding the bog cotton
yet they still waver and waver
resilient
tugging on the thread
'because they cannot lay an egg in the sea'
Tent Gallery, Edinburgh
2018