This project responds to two locations in the Solent - Hill Head and Eastney. We have brought our observations together in a series of artist books, film and sound.  The work was displayed in the Old Pay Office in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard, the building where Charles Dickens’ father John worked at the time of the author’s birth in 1812. The series of works take their name, “A Message from the Sea”, from the title of a short story published by Dickens in 1860.

As well as links with the book as an object, the building has connections with (a now lost) empire, and the use of the sea as a means of acquiring and exploiting territory. The placement of the works in that place aims to question the extent to which any human could be said to “rule the waves”.

The books and the film explore the idea of the sea as a “hyperobject” - a term coined by the philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton. In discussing phenomena such as global warming, nuclear radiation and black holes, he defines a hyperobject as vast, unknowable and “impossible for us to fully grasp as a whole with our senses”. 

Yet the sea impacts our lives on a daily basis. It manifests itself in our weather, the shape of our land, the food we eat, and inspires our thinking, art and literature. Dickens referred to the sea in many of his books. Some quotes from his works are included in the work as a way into considering the sea in different ways.

All these manifestations add to the overwhelming quantity of data we have about the sea, but it still does not add up to what the sea itself actually is, has been, and will ever be. In its entirety, it is outside of our control, our time scale, and our understanding.

So what does the sea know of itself? What would it tell us? What is its message? As the Dicken's character Paul Dombey asks of his sister, “The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?”

Whilst no single hand has guided their form, the works imagine the sea as their author.

Rob French & Amber Ward

April 2024