I have stepped into the fifth year of the Sea Library with a published text in a book created by a dream team. To say that I am happy, grateful, and feel honored wouldn’t be enough.
Five years ago I joined Twitter to soon find artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare on my salt-encrusted radar. As a ghostlike godmother and godfather of a Sea Library yet-to-be-born, they both meant to me a secret lot back then. To be in their company today on a printed page is a wish upon a star.
Tonight, there’s a book and exhibition opening at Hweg gallery in Penzance, Cornwall (on view until November 12). From today the “Radical Fauna” is available as a free e-book. Please, download, read, and share with young minds and rebellious souls to change the world back to beautiful. You’ll find my fairytale, written a month before the hell in Ukraine broke loose, on page 75.
“Radical Fauna” is a commentary, by a compendium of chimerical creatures, artworks made by the British contemporary artist Angela Cockayne, on the closing days of the Anthropocene and the first bewildering days of a new age yet to be defined. These ‘strandliners’ – ever changing tidal offerings, are the remains of the day and an era, of millennia and the last 500 years of oceanic discovery, enlightenment, and annihilation, all in the blink of a planetary eye…
DESPITE ALL THE WARNINGS, NO ONE QUITE EXPECTED THE BREATHTAKING SPEED AT WHICH THIS HAPPENED.
The book is accompanied by essays and photographies by Angela Cockayne, Sarah Chapman, Cal Flyn, Philip Hoare, Jeroen Hoekendijk, Scott McVay, Rupert Read, Manda Scott, and I, the sea librarian Anna Iltnere.
Download and read “Radical Fauna”. Or borrow a printed copy from the Sea Library.
Yours,
Anna x
Sea Library 