Naomi Hart

La mer

My latest work, ‘La mer’, is about the intertidal zone – the shifting world between the dry and the submerged land. Twice a day, the miracle feat of walking on the bottom of the sea and then floating above the solid ground you once stood on. This is unsettling, unstable ground, negative islands in an archipelago of water. What is up, what is down? These are windows in the ocean: beneath the still surface are myriad lives, but are we looking in or looking out from under the sea? The relentless push and pull of the tides means that this space is fugitive: whenever you try to grasp a moment it vanishes; washed away like a memory, always beyond reach.

The colours may seem to offer easy connections with summer, but they also reference earth minerals brought to the surface and carved out by human hand and forces of nature: coal, rust, copper, gold. The tides can be positive, bringing new life, or destructive, eroding millennia from cliff faces in a matter of minutes. The colours of the sea have leached from the land.

There is a balance in the tides: the sanctuary of rockpools, sheltering life from heat and evaporation as the waters recede. Points of strength which hold back the floodtides become points of weakness, breached to let through a migration of water, creatures and nutrients, back and forth every few hours. The gap is light and space, and a break in the defences. Points that touch, held together by atoms until they break – the flood is released, overwhelming everything either in a rush or a slow, steady infiltration.

‘the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.’

(Rachel Carson, ‘The Edge of the Sea’)

 

These paintings are all for sale unless marked sold. Please email me at naomi@naomi-hart.com or use the contact form if you are interested in purchasing. Thank you.

20cm x 20cm £150 +p&p

30cm x 30cm £300 +p&p

40cm x 40cm £450 +p&p

60cm x 60cm £1050 +p&p