Autobituary

Homecoming
As the tide reaches its highest point, domestic sand and salt will be reclaimed by the sea on Spurn Point at the mouth of the River Humber.

The artist writes:

“Several works of mine in the early seventies started from thoughts about displacement; political, social, material, geographical and psychological. This started a train of thought about where anything actually begins and what it is to belong.

With the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) seemingly in fuller and fuller swing in many spheres, it feels like flux can be the only acceptable reality whilst belonging can only be a 'present time' concept.

If you look at what constitutes anything, you can travel further and further back in time, deconstructing materiality until, finally, you have primarily only photons, protons, neutrons, electrons and neutrinos.

I wondered about returning things to their initial place. In a simple way, browsing supermarket shelves, I continued thoughts about origins and process. Seeing boxes of sea salt I thought about making salt sculptures that could be returned to the sea. I then thought about beach sand.

In the original work, Homecoming, made in 1971, I wrote SALT in salt and SAND in sand and waited for the tide to 'consume' them. The Homecoming at Spurn Point is a new sculptural, tide-based event in which sand and salt, in a different way, are reclaimed by the sea”.