Unswimmable Ocean

Despite living near the coast, the sea is a place of fear for me - “thy sea is so great and my boat is so small”.

When I visited Pérez Art Museum in Miami I was especially struck by Yoan Capote’s amazing art work “Island (see-escape)”. It’s massive - 8m long - and as a consequence it is immersive. It is also evocative, of a growing storm at sea, of a sunset horizon. The dark, oily-black water is churning, waiting to consume, the surface moving as only the deep can. It howls “danger”, embodying all the fears I feel in a boat on open water.

As I stood in its dark presence, I gradually realised it was not an oil painting. Move close and it dawns on you that this amazing image is made from fish-hooks. It is ingeniously and laboriously crafted from different sizes of hook to communicate perspective, so as the image recedes towards the horizon the size of the hooks used to create it diminishes (and consequently the density increases). The distant water is velvet-black and the horizon is a sharp-edged iron bar of minuscule hooks. There is no escape from this limitless prison.

The image keeps returning to me as a metaphor of the age - an unswimmable dark ocean of threat and danger, made from traps and snares, supposed open horizons actually creating an inescapable panopticon prison.