And Before Them, Nothing but Emptiness

From a vantage point of 100 feet above the sea, the horizon line appears roughly 12 miles away. Perhaps not coincidentally, 12 miles marks a threshold - the end of sovereign territory, and the beginning of International Waters. Beyond the horizon is an ocean of wild, ungoverned space, and the gap between is a cipher - a place where we live, where our experiences and memories are categorized, but a lacuna over which we are compelled to gaze, restlessly, away from our lives and towards the unseeable. This project was created over two summers, during the COVID-19 pandemic. +A note on the title of this series+ In W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn, the author offers a description of fishermen on the Norfolk coast, in England. Wondering about their motivation at a time when it is 'almost impossible to catch anything from the beach' Sebald concludes that they 'just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness'.