5. Sunk Island

The film work Sunk Island is a series of monitors, including a central larger screen showing a 12 minute film, surrounded by 4 smaller screens showing shorter film loops, and predominantly filmed in and around Sunk Island over the course of 3 years. This land is a wonder of historically engineered land, reclaimed from the water of the Humber estuary, and is a markedly flat territory, filled with reedbeds, waterways and field after field of wheat. It is alluvially extremely rich, and created by a long process of tidal trapping of water, and anchoring of the sediment that dropped from the stilled water. Over time, layer upon layer of sediment, purged of its salt by successive specific planting such as samphire and sea purslane created solid ground.

Lost and won again, Sunk Island reflects the historic actions of our control of water; dykes, sluices, and the silt dropping from the unusually stilled water. Lost places, evidenced by traces detected by LiDAR and marked by willows, such as Burstall Abbey, and found film depicting people whose identities are no longer known illustrate how water effects constant change, a communality of experience borne from encountering the same dynamic forces of the rivers and estuary. The shifting geographical boundaries of Sunk Island create a truly liminal, ever changing, dynamic and potentially deadly environment. This place embodies the notion of the transitory, with something of the uncanny about it, with its lack of distant history and temporary, man-made nature, and fated to inevitably disappear again.