Water Works

2022

Cyanotype, glass, pine, cyanotype stop-motion. 

During 2023 I began challenging myself to go for regular cold dips at Mākara, a beach located on the South Coast of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa. These highly ritualised immersions in the ocean have been a balm for grief, encouraging my body into a comforting, embryonic state. Every swim grants me the opportunity to choose kinship with the intertidal zone, to embrace the uncivilised nature of swimming wild, and to attune with bodily sensation. 

The process of going for a cold dip is mirrored in the process of creating cyanotypes on glass. Both rely on the ritual of being submerged under cold water and resurfacing transformed in some way. The wash bath that the glass cyanotypes are placed in after exposure must be ice-cold so the gelatine emulsion can harden.

My embodied experience of these cold dips has materialised in a body of work titled ‘Water Works’, consisting of three glass cyanotypes, backed by handmade lightboxes, and a projected cyanotype stop-motion video work, documenting the various textures, patterns and rhythms of this body of water.