tide – Creative Life in Suffolk

On the shore I walk a line alongside the sea. A tide line where the fringes of the water leave behind treasures of fragments sculpted by the water. Sometimes it’s hard to see to begin with, once found I am connected to it, held in a gentle trajectory. Plucking blue-green scribbled lines from the sand, or smooth rounded driftwood pebbles. Ragged gull feathers protrude from amongst the stones alongside ancient dark weathered shoe soles. Fragile seaweed skin-like plastics, salt eroded, fluttering caught in the shingle. After storms great multiples are washed ashore, hundreds upon hundreds of brittle stars. Lifting up onto spindly legs, walking back to the water. Snaking abundant lines of cuttlefish fish bones, brilliant white against the pebbles. Whelks eggs, mermaids purses and purple jewel like muscle shells pepper the drifts of seaweed. Always shifting, changing with the seasons and the tides.

Walking the tide line, eyes tracking the scattering of seaweed and driftwood. Tiny treasures present themselves. Churned up by the sea and caught in the sand, slipping from the fronds of surf. Fragments of crab shell, delicate dried whelk egg casings and scribbles of fishing line. Changing with the seasons, peppered with objects lost and discarded. The line changes with the tides and the weather. Sometimes a clear map along the shore, other days fragmented and broken. A peppered trail of whelks eggs, mermaids purses and honeycomb wood. Birds in the autumn migrate across the sea, flying in broken linear formations. They must lose some of their flock along the way along with the feathers shed into the water. Washed up along the shore tattered and stripped by the elements, broken structures clinging to their forms. Storms disrupt the line splaying it across the sand in ragged islands of sea vegetation. Scribbles of tangled grass, roots and fishing line. Ghostly white paper thin skeletal fish sit with polished remains of shells. Winding trails of foot prints emerge and fade, drawing journeys into the sand. The ebb and flow of souls along the fringes of the tide.