sea echo

Sea Echo is a performance created with Derek Jarman’s book Modern Nature as a starting point.

Written between 1989 and 1990 in the form of a diary, the book chronicles Jarman’s experiences of creating a garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent.

It weaves together observations of the natural world with reflections on art, politics, and Jarman’s personal life—particularly his diagnosis with HIV and the impact of the AIDS crisis on his community.

While reading, I began highlighting all the passages in which he mentioned water in its various forms: the different shades of the sea, rain, thunderstorms, lakes, tears, watering the garden, and so on. When I extracted and read them together, they felt like an endlessly evolving passage of time while also expressing a deep intimacy with that place.

The cycles and his relationship with his surroundings created a kind of score, inviting me to sing those words. For this performance, I used contact mics attached to a seashell and a trunk that was turned into an instrument.

Through Jarman’s diaries, we get in touch with intimate crafting of memories. Remembrance here was an echo, a reverberation of the natural phenomena that once surrounded him and now surround us.

For the performance I also created an incense with rosemary, a very familiar herb that is related to rememberance and grieve.