to the always talking sea

It begins with a slow walk along the shoreline at Kuri Bush.

I carry a camera, but I try to look before I photograph. I return to the same stretch of beach again and again, and each visit shows me something the last one did not.

Walking becomes a way of paying attention. Observing becomes a way of staying with a place instead of passing through it. Each photograph is a field note, a small record of what the tide left behind.

asemi nereid

Over time the seaweed stops looking like debris. Its curves, splits and tangles start to read like marks, as if the shoreline were writing and I had only just noticed.

Asemi-Nereid joins asemic, writing without fixed meaning, with the Nereids, the sea nymphs of Greek myth. It is a wordless script, and each beached specimen becomes a grapheme, one small unit of a language that invites you to project your own feeling onto it.

The script is not made for speaking. It is made for performing, and it links the shapes of plants with the study of signs.

Letters from the Sea

This language lives in the body. Made with movement artist Amber Liberte, the workshop invites people to trace seaweed forms with their hands, arms and whole bodies, as if the body were a brush painting in three-dimensional space.

Slow traces carry memory, and jagged ones carry tension. Sharp breaks in the voice mark the snap of a dried stalk, and rushing “sh” and “s” sounds echo kelp dragged over sand and waves pulling back over pebbles.

Participants move from looking, to naming shapes, to tracing them on paper, to full-body movement, to voice, and finally to composing sequences of their own.