Drift

“And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience…”
—Herman Melville

Who doesn’t recall from childhood the myth of seashell resonance? Holding a conch to one’s ear, the ocean could seemingly be heard in all its pelagic plenitude. The beguiling nature of the myth (that is, if one heard more than mere noise) resided in its apportioning of phenomenon both near and far, visceral and natural—so much that contained in so little this. Helena Wittmann’s Drift performs a similar, albeit more visual, inversion. The paradox of occlusion is that it can give rise to a sense of expansiveness, and Drift exploits this to trancelike effect, blurring the notion of literal and figurative shores beyond recognition.

Teresa (Teresaat these women’s feet in ways both literal and symbolic: the stuff of daily showers and holiday rumination, but also increasingly the tide anticipating crossings and separation too great to fully fathom.