Shoreline Portal

I live at the edge of the continent. My studio faces west, which means it faces the Pacific, which means every morning I begin work with the largest thing on Earth visible through the window. This is not something you get used to. The ocean does not permit familiarity; it is too large, too changeable, too honest. What it gives you instead of familiarity is proportion. Standing at its edge, you know exactly how big you are. This piece is about that knowledge. It is about the door between the domestic and the oceanic — the threshold you cross every time you step outside.

Shoreline Portal is the largest work I have made. The frame began accumulating before I had a glass to fill: months of foraging during the low tides of autumn and winter, setting aside the pieces that had something to say. Kelp in three varieties — bull, ribbon, ropy. Bladder wrack with its translucent vesicles still intact. Dried seed pods from the dunes above the high-tide line. Sea flora I cannot always name but recognise by texture. Every material was laid out in the studio, sorted, rejected or kept, re-sorted. The selection alone took three weeks.

The construction took four months. I worked section by section, building the frame in pieces and joining them on the glass when enough had been completed. The challenge of a full-length mirror is gravity: at six and a half feet tall, the frame must hold itself together without mechanical fasteners. The solution was density — layering the materials so tightly that they support each other, the way the ocean floor supports its own sediment. The finished frame has not moved. It holds.

When you stand before Shoreline Portal, the reflection that looks back at you is framed in everything the sea has put down and picked up again over its long history. You are inside a tide's-eye view of yourself. The room disappears. For a moment — if the light is right, if the time of day cooperates — you are standing at the water's edge. The portal is open. The ocean is on the other side.