Shorelines | David Burdeny
These works present my abiding interest in the thresholds that divide and connect the sea to land. I am fascinated with the quality of light and the spatial immensity of the ocean. I have enormous reverence for feeling so small in the presence of something so vast, where perspective, scale, time and distance momentarily become intangible.
Photographing as a process of clarifying this quality, I work towards creating formalized, liminal spaces. The glory lies not in this act of clarification or reduction, but in the experience of what is left - sublime experience located in ordinary space: a slowly moving sky, the sun moving across a boulders surface or sea foam swirling around a pylon.
Exposed under the light of dusk and dawn, the shutter is held open for several minutes, recording the ocean and sky as it continuously repositions itself on the negative, a process both dependent upon and vulnerable to chance. The resultant image is an accretion of past and present. Each moment is layered over the moment immediately preceding it - a single image that embodies the weight of cumulative time and unending metamorphosis.