Drifting Ecologies explores the entanglements and relationships between eroded coastal material and the body of the sea-swimmer, where bearing corporeal witness to crumbled cliff, skeletal salted trees, and plunged dwellings articulates an understanding of change and adaptation.

 If the visible is what we grasp through our eyes, then sensibilities are found through the senses, transformed from the world and received by the sensing body (Merleau Ponty,2012).

This simplistic interpretation of Merleau Ponty’s writings on sensation, nevertheless affords illumination to the physical changes when the body enters the sea.

The mesmeric dynamism of waves crashing onto the shore, then pulling away, drawing shoreline material into the water hypnotically teases us in towards the depths, before pushing us away.  An attracting and repelling sequence challenges our land locked status.  Bodies function well only up to and just over the water’s edge. Moving over this threshold demands a different way of being.

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Durational and arduous endeavour, enables body senses to contribute to a deep resonance with the land and sea. Working along the eroding Suffolk coast,  casts of the beach before it vanishes are created by pressing a 6B pencil into paper to make frottage drawings of sand and shingle as the tide arrives and leaves. Some are taken completely by the waves. For others, fragments are rescued from the sea removed from the beach as document.

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