Game Instructions
Vision of an Estuary
I live on an estuary. A thousand years ago a Carmelite friary was built on its banks, a busy hub with strong links to two nearby churches and the village just upstream. Ships of reasonable size came and went, bringing all manner of life to the broad expanse of water that must at all stages of the tide have been a lagoon of thriving activity, all at a time when the world was lit only by fire.
The thing is, it is no longer an estuary and hasn’t been for a long time, since the sea defences were built and shored it all up. So as with all our landscape it is now somewhere in which to look for clues as to how to read the place. As I walk these now very familiar contours, the imagination is fired by broken fragments of history. I can hazard a guess what it might have been to sail up into the estuary from the sea early one morning, or to be rowed across that lagoon on a busy Saturday morning, but these quickly become stories, my own narratives that say as much about my own limitations and my own presumption as about anything else. I would need even more words to give you the real flavour of it all. Which would be to miss the point.
Vision of an Estuary is a body of work that does away with the need for information and provides a silent juxtaposition of images that set you on your own journey up and down the estuary, finding your own patterns and clues to what the place might be…. a silent meditation on the experience of being in landscape.
Vision of an Estuary can be experienced in 3 different ways