An invisible ocean flows through us

coming to the surface as a body of water

Last Saturday my friend and fellow Orkney artist Sheena Graham-George organised the first of a series of screenings of short films made by visual artists based in these islands. She invited us to contribute whatever we wanted, with no particular curatorial direction. But when we gathered at the weekend in the old-fashioned village hall of St Margaret’s Hope to watch the first screening, now beautifully edited together by Stromness based film-maker Mark Jenkins, there was a striking consistency of tone, aesthetic and subject matter.

Water, it seems, is a recurring fascination for islanders.

You can view my own contribution, a short film-poem “Sink” here.

This little film was made just at the start of the first COVID lockdown, back in the spring of 2020. Looking back now, just four years later, it’s already hard to recall how abruptly the external structures of our lives collapsed and showed us just how fragile it all was. I spent a lot of time watching the loch beside our house, observing the life on and around it. “Sink” is a piece about silence and water and learning to be still, made in response to that very particular moment. It’s just five minutes of your time. I hope you like it.

In Mark’s lovely editing sequence, he placed his own film “Surface” just after it in the showreel. Here it is.

I love the playfulness of this film. We are plopped in and out of the waters around Orkney, snorkelling our way through harbours, beaches, water troughs, silty lochs, fast-running streams, the crab factory’s holding tanks, nosing our way between storm-shredded seaweed, algal slime, drifting jellyfish, barnacled hulls, half-grown ducklings and sea-weathered slips. For Orcadians, there’s the added game of guessing where we have popped up this time, spotting familiar landmarks and faces. It’s a seal’s eye view of familiar places and people that makes us see them afresh.

As the film’s narrative builds momentum through its rhythm, repetition and pace what struck me was a deeper story; a vivid sense of how all water is one water. There is no ‘body of water’ that doesn’t constantly flow in and out of every other.

Our own homes are part of this cyclic flow of water: our kitchen sinks, our glass of water on the bedside table, our dishwashers, showers, toilets, septic tanks, sewage works, storm drains. Our bodies are too, and not only when we drink and piss, but with every cycle of our breath. An invisible ocean flows through us. Our bodies are bodies of water, no less than the harbours, animal troughs and streams in Mark’s film.

There’s a suggestion here too of larger cycles that reach beyond the body of the Earth. The film’s repetitive cycle of submerge and resurface creates a Samsaric cycle like death and rebirth, that ends with the final shot, as drops of rain sparkle on the dark water surface like distant stars. We are left with a feeling of buoyancy, of lightness, of a deep breath taken. “Surface” is a good word for this feeling, and for this film.

I’d like to write something about the other films that were screened too, and I will soon, but that’s for another time.

Join The Life Raft Co-Working

Here’s your weekly invitation to join our co-working session, Wednesday 3pm to 4pm (GMT). We just say hello, introduce ourselves, say what we’ll be working on and leave cameras on while we quietly get on with it in a shared online workspace. It’s become a highlight of my week and it’s lovely to see so many also making it a regular thing.

Come along, and feel free to share the invite if you know anyone who might like to join us.

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Once again, my heartfelt thanks to those who have upgraded to a paid subscription. It’s a joy to know you appreciate what I am sharing and creating here. It’s a labour of love, but bills need paid too, so thank you thank you.

Until next week

Sam