Notes on Slow Erosion
For three years I returned to the same stretch of coastline, recording its gradual transformation. Notes on Slow Erosion brings together photographs, sediment samples, sound recordings, and field notes from these visits. The work resists the dramatic register that often accompanies images of environmental change. There are no collapsing cliffs here, no urgent before-and-afters. Instead, the project attends to the smaller registers of loss — the redistribution of pebbles after a storm, the slow retreat of a particular line of grass, the changing acoustics of a bay as its shape subtly shifts. I wanted to ask what it might mean to grieve at the pace of geology, or to celebrate it. The exhibition is arranged as a kind of archive, with hand-bound notebooks visitors are invited to read, vitrines containing dated samples, and large-format photographs hung in chronological sequence. A continuous audio piece, composed from field recordings, plays throughout the space. The project is not a document of crisis but a practice of attention. It proposes that staying with a place — really staying, across seasons and years — is itself a political and ecological act, and one increasingly rare in a culture organised around speed.