the tide pool room: a love story

Abstract

the tide pool room: a love story uses durational film, an immersive hammock installation, and creative essays about swimming to create emotional crosscurrents between love, loss, friendship, water, and tide pools. The film is 6 hours and 13 minutes long, which is the length of time between low tide and high tide on planet Earth. It is composed of long shots of coastal landscapes surrounding Sitka, Alaska, including underwater footage. The film uses local sounds of waves, barnacles, seabirds, and hydrophone recorded sounds interlaced with an experi- mental musical score composed and performed by Julie Zhu. An immersive installation with ten tie-dyed hammocks, bean bags, and underwater mood lighting invites viewers to stay awhile. The film is projected as large as possible on a gallery wall. The film score plays over surround speakers. Two black fiberglass fountain sculptures create water sounds that interact with the sounds of the film. A large-scale tie dye painting is suspended over a wall. The viewer is also invited to take a booklet of short essays. The first essay, Six Ways of Cutting a Fish, is a sequence of prose poems medi- tating on cutting a fish aboard a commercial fishing boat. The second section is a series of essays called Swimming with my Friend, which is a collection of memories examining the emotional parallels of swimming and loving a close friend. The creative works bring together several disparate 'sites of exchange,' places where two bodies overlap, exchange material and transform each other: The knife and the fish, the sea and the tide pool, and myself and my friend. By placing alongside each other these different narratives, the work seeks to explore several interlocking questions: What can cutting fish teach me about love? What can love teach me about cutting fish? What can I learn about love and loss by investigat- ing sites of exchange in my own life? Can art help me to answer these questions in a way that other forms of research cannot? This document explores the background that lead to this work, includ- ing my personal experiences fishing and swimming, the art and feminist theories that guided the project, and the methodologies that I used in my creative research. I analyze the art work through the lens of my research questions and discuss my findings about the nature of love, loss, and water.