I Was Once the Sea

Before it was a destination, it was a displacement. Marked on maps as a void of potential, this man-made island was built for a purpose that never arrived. No one came. No one stayed. It has no inhabitants and no past of its own, and so, it seems, no memory.

But it was made from something that does. To raise the island, sand was taken from the seabed and carried to a place it had never been, matter relocated by force to serve a plan. Memory does not require habitation. It lives in what has been moved.

The island is a beast that swallowed the sea floor. Sand became concrete, concrete became architecture, and at the centre of the body lies the car park, its belly, where the consumed material is held as wall, ceiling and column.

In I Was Once the Sea, the sand returns to its first state of motion. Inside the belly of the beast it rises as wave, as vessel, as sea, a swell breaking against artificial walls, a hull lifting as though to sail. The material is released from the blueprint, yet remains inside the body that consumed it.

The island cannot remember. The sand remembers for it.

When the exhibition closes, the works will dissolve and return to the sea.