There is the Beach, There is the Ocean

Abstract

My work investigates our complex cultural relationship with Nature with a capital "N", in particular the fantasy of tropical space: a collage of impressions and desires which ossify into a psychological 'elsewhere' that is in fact no place at all. By making images that simultaneously trigger and violate romantic tropes, I attempt to reverse the gaze of the tourist back onto itself. This essay describes the process by which I became a tropical tourist at the age of six, the year that I found my father’s heart-attacked body on our kitchen floor. This early experience of mortality, coupled with yearly family trips to the beach, created the representational code by which I now work out poetic relationships with desire and loss.

Keywords

• nostalgia
• beach
• landscape
• glamour
• mortality