Tidal Timespace: Imprints & Palimpsests
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Cast plaster, steel, inkjet on Asuka, photopolymer and relief, audio
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Tides, especially ones connected to estuaries and mudflats, perform polyrhythmic writings and erasings; concealing and revealing their ghostly spectral traces at ebb tide. Each set of tracings, unique, is wiped away by the following tide and a new performance unveils a fresh set of inscriptions. As quintessentially liminal spaces, these landscapes provide a fleeting platform for entanglements with humans and non-humans—and each state of material becoming is haunted by what has recently been, and what is soon to become again. In this collaborative project, I think of these visible remains witnessed at low tide as palimpsests and capture them in plaster casts that record the still-wet, intricate patterns inscribed by invertebrates, currents, and other beings, mapping the diversity and signature of both Bahía Adair in Sonora, Mexico, and the Severn Estuary in the UK.
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Located in the Upper Gulf of California, Bahía Adair has the third-largest tidal range in North America and is a sparsely populated wetland complex fringed with salt pans, freshwater springs, and multiple esteros (also known as inverse or negative estuaries, hypersaline estuaries occurring in dry climates as evaporation exceeds inflow of freshwater). The Severn Estuary, fed by the Severn River, has the second largest tidal range in the world, and a rich maritime culture that has been cultivated for millennia. Both places have sustained environmental damage and face continued threats and the risk of climate change-driven transformation. Estuaries, deltas and related tidal places are crucial to both marine and terrestrial ecology. They are places of extraordinary mixings of life in rhythmic cycles and are sites of kinship between many forms of life.
The finished project will feature identical elements for each site—a row of plaster mudflat casts, a tidal timelapse concertina stretched across a metal stand, and a series of bilingual artist books that interweave scripts made by intertidal kin, lexicons full of local distinctions and stories within the sphere of tidal humanities, and a photo essay with a subsequent ‘poem’ created from the author’s personal libraries about these two sites.
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The Bahía Adair portion of the project is nearly complete. I've been working with fisherman Rafael Peñuelas Machuca recording his childhood memories with his father in the early 60s, and diver Ernesto Gastellum who has taken me by boat or 4x4 truck to remote sites along Bahía Adair to make the casts. For the final installation, the casts will float along the walls, their locations shown on a hand-drawn map, and the artist books will be layed out on a table for the audience to peruse. When the work is shown in Mexico, a silent auction for the individual casts and artist books will help raise money and awareness for a non-profit environmental organization CEDO Intercultural.
I began working on the second stage of this project in the Severn Estuary in spring 2024, working with Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Severn Estuary Partnership, and my main collaborator geographer Owain Jones to record palimpsests on both the English and Welsh sides of the Estuary and create identical artist books with the lexicon and vignettes. Once complete, the proceeds from the sale of casts will benefit the Severn Estuary Partnership.
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By examining these two landscapes side-by-side, Owain and I aim to share both subtle and distinct characteristics and convey each other’s care of these places. We hope the project can create an intriguing contrast and unique framework for bringing about awareness of climate impacts on estuaries world-wide, which look to be quite severe (Nienhuis et al, 2023).
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It would be an impoverished sensibility if one did not feel, when on intertidal land at low tide, the strangeness of the same space at high tide. This is part of the wonder of estuaries and part of their vulnerability. And all this is overlain now by a darker future specter of climate change, sea level rise and storm surge induced erosion. Just as the mudflats become a palimpsest after the tide’s daily erasing of the cursive travel of snails and other scripted impressions, so too, do many man-made pursuits; the overwriting for development obliterates rich ecological stories and effaces local narratives.
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“Rhythm is to time what pattern is to space, and these need to be considered together. Tidal processes offer fertile ground on which to explore such ideas as they are so obviously temporal and spatial at once.”
Lunar-solar rhythmpatterns: towards the material cultures of tides, Owain Jones