INTERTIDAL INDEX

2024

Location: Thames Estuary · Allhallows · Kent · England

Intertidal Index is a site-responsive work made directly within the Thames Estuary, where land meets sea. Using cyanotype, a light-sensitive process, the work is created in direct collaboration 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 work emerges through the agency of the site itself. The process is initiated and then relinquished to the more-than-human: to 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 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 of entanglement, a residue of shared authorship between environment and process.

In an era increasingly defined by ecological precarity, Intertidal Index resists mastery and offers instead a quiet ethic of attunement. Realism is proposed as encounter, a way of making with, rather than about, the world.