Output details

The sea inside

Research content/process:

My book is an interrogation of my relationship with my immediate environment, Southampton Water, and the way it straddles both human and natural history. The sense of migration—of animals, birds, people, ideas—became paramount in the manner in which the book expanded, organically, to the Isle of Wight and London, and from there to the Azores, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, and New Zealand. The overriding theme of the book—beyond the obvious one of the sea—gradually emerged as that of ‘home’, and what it means to us as well as to other species. There is a particular focus on cetaceans—which have been identified as having their own ‘culture’—but also on birds, and the newly-emerging theories about their behaviour, culture, and migrations.

I counterpointed these elements of natural history with biographical details of figures such as T.H. White, Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul Bowles, Truganini, and Te Pehi Kupe, thus focusing on the human relationship with the natural world, and the meeting of cultural myth and contemporary science. The book created its own structure, based on my travels and the serendipitous nature of the way I work, using primary and secondary source material in conjunction with personal and family memoir, travelogue, and scientific enquiry.

Principal sources were published texts, including novels, journals, memoirs, art catalogues, and scientific papers. I conducted dozens of interviews with scientists, curators, artists, naturalists, and writers, as well as undertaking many expeditions at sea on research vessels. Photography and imagery—archival and contemporary—played a major role in the artistic direction of the book. The result was a very personal work, but one which I hope had a greater relevance to our shared, but often vexed, experience of, and relationship to, the natural world.