Out Of Water: the singers are out of breath. The swimmers are out of their depth. At the bottom of windswept sand dune cliffs, the sea glistens. A group of singers and swimmers strike out towards the water’s edge. They each look towards the sea, eyes intent, focused on the horizon, searching for something, is somebody lost at sea? Created by artists Helen Paris and Caroline Wright, Out of Water features a newly commissioned sound-score by composer Jocelyn Pook and singing by UK soprano Laura Wright.
“The sea glistens mirage-like in the distance. In the early morning light a group of singers and swimmers strike out towards the water’s edge until they span the wide expanse of beach. They each look towards the sea, eyes intent, focused on the horizon, searching for something. Is somebody lost at sea?”
Created by Helen Paris and Caroline Wright
What I’ve got here is something rawer than the academic packaging wants to admit. Fort Funston, those windblasted cliffs where San Francisco runs out of real estate and just surrenders to the Pacific, it’s the kind of place that doesn’t lie to you. The fog doesn’t apologize, the sand doesn’t compromise, and the ocean sure as hell doesn’t care about your conceptual framework.
These singers and swimmers, they’re staging this ritualized desperation, this manufactured longing dressed up in soprano voices and compositional intent, but here’s the thing: my camera doesn’t give a damn about the artist statement. What bleeds through the lens is something older, dumber, more honest. Bodies in space. The human animal doing what it does when confronted with vastness: looking, searching, pretending there’s an answer out there on that horizon.
I get it though. These images don’t oversell. I just show you: here are humans, here is sand, here is the implacable fact of water. The bodies look small because they are small. The light’s that Northern California gray that makes everything feel like it’s already a memory before I even press the shutter.
“Out of breath, out of their depth.” Cute wordplay, but the ocean doesn’t traffic in metaphor. It just is. And these performers, whatever their intention, whatever theoretical apparatus they’re serving, they’re just more mammals at the edge of the continent, doing that thing we do: standing at the boundary of what we know and singing into the void like it might sing back. It won’t. It never does.