The Graveyard, Grand Banks

Stills from the newly edited video "Entanglements," filmed in 2007 by me in Newfoundland

Its hard to say whats going on here, so let me explain. It was at the end of my residency just as I was pushing to see this place is yet another light. After capturing so much unexpected beauty, glaring, soaring and at times boring beauty, I wanted to set into something darker. I had been told by the elder fisherman that the sea in this area held many pockets with unusual currents that swept anything be it net, body, or in my case camera to the bottom and held it there. A captive of sorts. This sounded like just what I needed so to push the limits of my filming. I wanted the sea to really be the force that was making the images. That was growing ever more important to have a clearer vision of how the movement of the sea changed the perspective that I was allowed to view. What the sea filmed is what I saw.

So I set out to look for one of these pockets in the sea, one of these"graveyards" where the sea held its prisoners. I was given a riddle-like list of clues of what to look for, along with head nods and twitchy gestures that indicated the far end of the cove. I set out after refusing the offered beer, and promising to take them up on one when the weather grew warm (gave me a good month I figured) It was the area that I had completely avoided, and later became the place of broken equipment. After several minutes of tricky climbing with a sagging load of snacks and cameras, I was very grateful to have not added the beer to the climb. One beer for me is the equivalent of twenty for another.

As I faced a twenty foot drop, a young mother gull sat on a distant nest and watched me. I needed to make sure that she did not abandon the nest because of me, but like the fisherman she seemed to welcome the interest in her home and even seemed to be entertained by my unravelling sixty feet of cable and casting it to the wind. My efforts were humbling at best. But I did manage to hit a spot where the undertow took the camera down to the "graveyard." Bleached old kelp and seaweed swayed softly to a rhythm separate from the surface of the sea.

So when I rediscovered this footage, I realized that its tempo was so different that I needed to work with that. Also the tangle of these uprooted plants became a labyrinth when filmed from within.