Dover Sole

Dungeness at 4am. Father and Son start once again. The sun offering modest heat today, a relief from the day before. Their faces map that it is rarely this tranquil, the skin’s indelible marks that don’t disappear when the wind, hail and salt relent. The Mallet, the grimace offers a moment into what we don’t want to see, perhaps never think about. It isn’t the image of the neat ‘best of’, ‘finest’ range - box-perfect packaging in white stacks that are branded into our consciousness. Instead we see the tension of the kill, the Skate suffocating, its white belly exposed, surrounded by the appendages of the nets collateral damage. In a world that increasingly separates us from reality, at best gentrifies our understanding of eating other flesh, at worst blocks out any connection altogether, the pictures are a reminder of the animal toil and manual hard labour of capturing the dinner party specialties.