Sea Library is a room for the sea. Seashells, driftwood, books and art grow on walls like corals on a reef. Far from being a white cube, the library is mirrored in each and every frame, creating a world of many dimensions and merged stories.
I ask each artist, what the sea means for him and her.
This week it’s Rosalind Pounder. In spring I received the most precious thing for the Sea Library. “Strandline Nest” from Rosalind, made from waste material gathered on a beach in Norfolk. “From this beach if you travelled directly North you would reach the Baltic,” she writes on a postcard.
Rosalind Pounder is a British artist whose work grows from an engagement with the world around her. Books, nest-like vessels and gatherings, ritualistic in their construction and created using foraged, natural and manmade materials, become sanctuaries finding humble epiphany within the ordinary. Rosalind transforms that which is often overlooked or discarded into something intriguing and unexpected.
“I live in the middle of England. The sea is at least 90 miles away. I rarely get to visit the sea these days. The sea however, as for all island dwellers, surrounds me. It is the outer limit of my small world, both boundary and destination. A psychological motif and upholder of the evidence of human disrespect for the planet on which we live. The sea, ever present in my consciousness, what does it mean to me? An emotional trope and pathetic fallacy; a tempest a surge and hider of riptides; a putter in place of people; an eternity like looking up into the night sky; a consumer of the setting sun and birthing partner to the rising sun; a servant to the moon; the sound of a thousand hushed voices in the silence between waves; an eroder of stones, underminer of cliffs and chopper off of dunes; a home to fish and who knows what; a reflector of moon and stars and lighthouse beams and mysterious flashes in the night; a stage setting for passing ships and forests of wind turbines; a surreptitious silent creeper over salt marsh; a ‘return to sender’ of our rubbish – redelivered to the strand line of our shores.”
Rosalind Pounder
See more of Rosalind Pounder’s art here and follow her on Twitter.
Sea Library 