Traces: high tide (cuttlefish and porpoise)

Traces, high tide (cuttlefish and porpoise) Charred cuttlebone in linseed oil on gesso and oak

Beyond thrilled that this drawing has been published in Dark Mountain issue 26 'Dark Ocean' this month. This one means a lot – I'll try and put it into words…. I discovered Dark Mountain about 8 years ago. I’d read a book by Paul Kingsnorth and it was mentioned in the bio. Intrigued I looked it up. And it was one of those strange private moments that felt like stepping through a portal. Until that point I hadn’t really found people who seemed to see the world a bit like me. To whom the loss was a visceral hurt. Who, like me, had the devastating, unwanted, inability to look away, to unsee. It was unsettling. Deeply lonely. Where were they? I ordered my first copy. Opened the first page. And there they were. People who not only saw the loss, but held the ache of it in their bones. People who could howl into the wind with the overwhelming fear and rage of it all. People who could also follow the thin threads of joy and even hope to the surface too. Who could take in great breaths of the sheer starburst brilliance. The day felt a little brighter. The trees a little greener.

This drawing is part of an ongoing series inspired by the Tibetan concept of ‘shul’, as described by Rebecca Solnit: ‘the impression of something that used to be there’. Medium is central to meaning and the work explores ideas of memory and story held within the visual and physical traces individuals of interdependent species leave behind.

Here, two inter-reliant individuals are present; the one solely visually, the other in material form only. In death both demonstrate the extreme precarity of their entangled existence in the face of the combined threats of pollution, climate change, over-fishing and habitat loss.

A poem, written after the finding of the porpoise skeleton on the beach, was published by Wild Roof Journal in January 2024 and can be found here.