the submersion series is a series of works related to
swimming pools that I have been working on for a number of years. I
am especially interested in the play of safety and danger with
which pools are charged and the ways in which they might be read as
spaces of the sublime, where control and abandon are held in a
precarious balance.
Rather than in social histories of swimming, as related to public
health or leisure, I am drawn to the spatial and symbolic
properties of pools and the psychological resonances to which these
give rise.
Truthing Gap involves research into undersea environments and related human activity. It is driven by an interest in the extra visual/geographic nature of the submaritime.
Between 2008-10 I was Leverhulme Trust, Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, one of the world's top five oceanographic research institutions, working with sonar geophysicist Dr Tim Le Bas exploring methods of seabed mapping and undersea survey. The project explored the play of myth, imagination and objectivity, involved in envisaging environments that cannot be directly experienced, probing issues of knowledge production, perception and the nature of the scientific gaze.
Performance, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. 10,923.00 metres of string, enough to reach the bottom of the deepest surveyed point on Earth, Challenger Deep, were laid out on the dockside, over a six hour period.