When we think of the globe, our thoughts are terrestrial. Our mind’s eye can trace out the contours of continents, placing landmass in relation to landmass. This makes sense of course, land is our primary zone of entanglement. It is where our lives have unfolded generation after generation for millennia. This view however is not the dominant one, at least not at a planetary level.
Over 70% of this Earth’s surface is covered in water, not land. It is here, in these vast and fluid connective tissues that entirely other understandings of the world might be explored. Amongst the vastest of these oceanic scapes is the Pacific.
Living at its edge, as I do, the enormity of its presence is humbling. Casting your sense out to the horizon, the complexity of movement and sound is consuming and sometimes even confusing. Its density and activity on the surface hides a far deeper resonance, one that vibrates not just the crust but through to the mantle of the Earth itself. The Pacific plate is the world’s most active, vibrating and pulsating with an occasional rupturing outburst.
It's this dynamism that has created such a fascination for me. Over the past two decades I have had the great fortune to travel widely across the Pacific, and visit its continents, its islands, its atolls and its shores. Each perspective it offers diverges from the last. It has a voice, but one that speaks in many dialects and languages.
These recordings, made at various points in and around the Pacific, capture only the slightest dimension of this language. Yet as modest as the recordings are, they speak to the intense power and vitality that exists in the fluid materiality of this ocean.