Salty superstition...

Slip a pearl into his pocket, draw a swallow on his foot, hide his boots, fill his bath water with salt, add black pepper to his food, grind peony root and add it to the wash, wrap strands of his hair around oak branches, buy him shirts of sky blue... it won't matter; if she wants him there's no stopping her, you can't argue with the sea...

I'm working on two narratives for my final year and one sculpture project, this may change as I continue, but just now it's the "haunted" story and the bog cotton, along with this narrative, a story of pearls, superstition and the sea. It started to come through as I worked on last years Rose narrative, I would sit down to write for the rose photographs and would find myself writing a different story... or I would just decide to photograph the pearls instead, I would see the image in my mind and need to create it...

I'm not as sure of this one as I am of haunted but it will be interesting to see how it progresses, I feel it must be in my head and is a story that needs told, so I hope to allow it to develop organically and see what it is... is that strange? :)

As the storms rolled in that spring the apple blossomed early, its fresh scent rose in waves drawing schools of rosy salmon into the shallows, and when they were cut open their bellies were full of bones and buckles, pearls and rings, and lost souls that settled right on the sea green slabs of the harbour. They clung to the salt and seaweed on the men’s boots and travelled home with them, settling in on the garden paths and in the branches of those apple trees...

I wrote the above narrative a long time ago, it was just waiting in one of my many notebooks, and so when I photographed the pearls it just seemed perfect. What is interesting me with this one is the mnemonics, I seem to be unconsciously triggering myself to progress the narrative..

I grew up having holidays on a Donegal island, and an island on Strangford Lough, my parents spent years at sea before I was born, making it around the world twice on various ships, and family mythology tells that an ancestor was washed up in cork from a foreign land (we guess Spain). My friends are surfers and sailors and so given all that I suppose the salt water is in my blood... there's that mythology again ;)

That May the air turned hazy, and as the boats set out the forget-me-not wove itself through the grass, little pieces of sky fallen to earth, a sure sign of a love to be lost...