SideMenu
Skip to Navigation

polaroid

Now we are Landlubbers

My father is a boatbuilder. He loves the sea, boats, the wide expanse, the freedom. When I was a child, he left my mother and I behind at home in Ireland to work with Greenpeace, recording Whale activity off the coast of the Azores. I remember him training for the trip, doing a navigation course. He would come home with photocopies of blank signal flags, I would colour them to spell messages and watch him doing calculations as though it was a kind of magic.

When he returned from his voyage, the sea had bitten him. He couldn't get enough of the ocean.

I've seen through uncountable landscapes

Different images united to draw a unique horizon. I tripped around the earth through the pictures I've taken, through those I found in my family albums and through the love I carry within. The sea is one whole world that goes from light to deep blue, and it always match.

I used to be a sailor

I used to be a sailor:

As a child, I spent seven years sailing the seven seas. My father is a boatbuilder and it was his dream to take my Mother and I on a journey to places we could only dream of.

Adventures we had. Our first journey from Kinsale, Ireland to Gibraltar led to us being fired at by Portuguese pirates aboard an unmarked fishing trawler. I stayed below deck watching anxiously from the porthole while my Dad ducked under bullets and fired flares back at them. Our 42 foot steel bilge keeled boat had a fast turning circle, and we span on the spot deflecting their attacks. Eventually their engines burned out and we skulked away turning off our lights. At seven years old I became suddenly aware of my own mortality and what it meant to be a tiny vessel in a vast ocean.

Syndicate content