Saltwater Spirits
Saltwater Spirits is an ongoing body of experimental work exploring the folklore of coastal landscapes and the unseen presences that inhabit them. Situated within the liminal territory where land meets sea, the project investigates how myth, memory, and spirit shape our understanding of place.
Across cultures, shorelines have long been imagined as threshold spaces—sites of encounter between worlds, where boundaries become permeable and the familiar gives way to the unknown. In these landscapes, spirits emerge not as isolated beings but as expressions of geography itself: inhabiting tidal marshes, rocky coves, submerged forests, estuaries, sea caves, and forgotten harbors.
The project draws upon maritime folklore, vernacular belief, and the poetics of place to examine the relationship between environment and imagination. Rather than illustrating specific legends, the works seek to evoke the atmospheres, traces, and hauntings embedded within coastal terrains. Water becomes both archive and erasure; the shoreline a shifting space where stories accumulate, dissolve, and reform.
Working experimentally across media, the project embraces process, materiality, and surface as forms of inquiry. Paint, drawing, printmaking, textiles, found materials, and installation are employed to create works that mirror the instability of the landscapes they reference. Layering, weathering, translucency, and transformation become methods through which folklore is embodied rather than depicted.
Saltwater Spirits is ultimately an exploration of folkloric landscapes—places where the physical and the imagined are inseparable, and where the sea continues to shape not only the land, but the stories we tell about it.
Saltwater Spirits is an ongoing body of experimental work exploring the folklore of coastal landscapes and the unseen presences that inhabit them. Situated within the liminal territory where land meets sea, the project investigates how myth, memory, and spirit shape our understanding of place.
Across cultures, shorelines have long been imagined as threshold spaces—sites of encounter between worlds, where boundaries become permeable and the familiar gives way to the unknown. In these landscapes, spirits emerge not as isolated beings but as expressions of geography itself: inhabiting tidal marshes, rocky coves, submerged forests, estuaries, sea caves, and forgotten harbors.
The project draws upon maritime folklore, vernacular belief, and the poetics of place to examine the relationship between environment and imagination. Rather than illustrating specific legends, the works seek to evoke the atmospheres, traces, and hauntings embedded within coastal terrains. Water becomes both archive and erasure; the shoreline a shifting space where stories accumulate, dissolve, and reform.
Working experimentally across media, the project embraces process, materiality, and surface as forms of inquiry. Paint, drawing, printmaking, textiles, found materials, and installation are employed to create works that mirror the instability of the landscapes they reference. Layering, weathering, translucency, and transformation become methods through which folklore is embodied rather than depicted.
Saltwater Spirits is ultimately an exploration of folkloric landscapes—places where the physical and the imagined are inseparable, and where the sea continues to shape not only the land, but the stories we tell about it.
