PASSAGES

Standing out in the light drizzle this morning and listening to the lonesome cries of seagulls circling above … recalling the passages from Jane Alison’s The Love Artist … and how this sound brims with pathos.   Like whistling.  Whistling is often considered somewhat jolly, yet it is the very embodiment of some anthro-avian hybrid which is at once the most poignant and otherworldly sound.  Anyone who needs convincing should listen to Goldfrapp’s Lovely Head … the most melancholic whistling wafts through the beginning of this track.  And the gulls carried my mind to the sea, not far away, and thoughts of horizons and all that falls off the edge of the world.  Watching a container ship as it hove itself into the onslaught of the southerly, balancing on the thin line of the horizon, wobbling back and forth.  The meeting of sea and sky, all that is sold melting into air …

Laurence Aberhart

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascape Series

J Bowring, Oamaru, December 2005