Beside The Seaside

Beside The Seaside sets out to explore the South and South East coast of England by analysing and documenting the natural and human landscapes found along its shores. Observing how these landscapes interact with one another to form multifaceted spaces. Whether they are industrial or natural and feature trace evidence of humanity or direct human interactions; these will be archived as fleeting visual memories.

This project is deeply rooted in my experience from the past and present. Beside The Seaside was conceived when I started to think back on my childhood holidays and how I have seen the English landscape on the South coast.

To me it always had this strange and slightly out of place hybridity. It didn’t quite feel right to me and I was aware of the impermanence of the structures, people and experience. The wrecked piers to the battered groynes and sand castles which were taken out with the tide. It felt like everyone was obligated, in their small groups to experience these spaces and then consume and disregard them in fleeting moments, as quickly as they arrived they left rubbish, imprinted their body shapes on the sand and the echoes of voices and conversations lingered, their essence; to be washed out with the tide or blown away with the prevailing wind. Leaving a hollow and empty space of ghostly laughter to whistle and scream around the peeling concrete walls, eroding steel columns and splintered wooden planks. Which in turn slowly decay into the sea, carrying the memories and experience to be absorbed in the primordial soup of time. In conjunction, the natural landscape is constantly changing and living, even if suffocated or interfered by a human presence, the resilience of nature to thrive, carry on and adapt while we keep on our business of leisure and industry is truly fascinating.

These hybrid landscapes of humanity and nature will always be strange to me. The thought that we as humans have just taken a natural area and placed entertainment and industry on top of it, in a place which is most precarious by nature. These coastal spaces are in constant flux and in need of constant repair and replenishing to hold back the relentless power of the sea.

Walking down the concrete, granite and tarmac promenade, with the salty wind ever present on your burnt face, in gusts small and large, you will come to a different area. An area of coastline that has to have it’s depths constantly dredged out to allow giant and small vessels of all kinds to come close to the land and dock up against the concrete filled green and slimy banks. Allowing the lights of commerce and consumerism to carry on, while they import and export goods and services from all over the world and keep the modern world ticking, right next to and on top of the natural.