INTERTIDAL INDEX

2024

Location: Thames Estuary · Allhallows · Kent · England

Intertidal Index is a site-responsive work made directly within the shifting threshold of the Thames Estuary, where land meets sea. Using cyanotype, a light-sensitive process, the artist collaborated with the tidal landscape itself. Pebbles, seaweed, sand, jellyfish, and brackish water leave indexical traces on the surface, producing a visual register of more-than-human encounter.

This is not an image of place, but a work shaped by the site itself. The artist initiates the process, but relinquishes control to the more-than-human: the tide’s timing and flow, the sediment’s imprint, the chemical uncertainty of exposure. In this way, Intertidal Index engages what might be termed a posthuman realism — a mode of practice grounded not in representation but in co-emergence and material agency.

Liminality is central to the work: the intertidal zone becomes both subject and collaborator, a site where boundaries— ecological, temporal, epistemological — remain in flux. The cyanotype medium, with its reliance on light and time, reinforces this instability. The result is a document not of fixity but of entanglement, a residue of shared authorship between artist and environment.

In an era increasingly defined by ecological precarity, Intertidal Index resists mastery and offers instead a quiet ethic of attunement. It proposes realism not as depiction, but as encounter — a way of making with, rather than about, the world.