Objets Trouvés - Portminster Beach, St. Ives
...lost things, found storiesWe can be careless when we are carefree. And no matter how careful we are to leave no trace we cannot help but leave more than footprints in the sand. Nature’s careless too, of course, in the ebb and flow of the world’s continuous cycles of growth and decay. Evidence of human coming and going is everywhere intertwined with these fragments of shell, feather, and stone: the flora & fauna of land, sea and air. The inevitable flotsam and jetsam of our presence mingles with the sand and is almost indistinguishable but for vibrancy of colour, logotype and machine-made shape.
Every day someone walks along a beach somewhere. The beach at Porthminster in St. Ives, Cornwall is like many others: typically English, a café serves food in season, it is overlooked by a putting course and B&Bs, the charm of a railway hugs the cliffs on its hourly seaside path to and from Penzance. Twice a day the tide sweeps most of the beach clean and the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is mostly gone once more. Some of it is recycled and brought back. Some of it remains.
I am interested in the stories which evolve out of found objects. Or the questions about the things themselves. A selection of the found objects are paired with fictional narrative, short stories, biography, facts, haiku and other poetic forms.
Presented initially in proof book form this is a record of the minutiae of human and natural interaction discovered on this one beach, found on one walk, one day in 2009.
Download a PDF (smal, low-res) copy here.
Any comments on this project please Contact me.
Status: Complete but unpublished edition in hardcopy, PDF and ePub (please contact me for a copy as the Epub is a large file).
Year: 2010
Website: n/a
George Melly’s obit in The Guardian is worth reading.
Art Work
Every artist was first an amateur - Ralph Waldo Emerson











