This is a quick glimpse of the Tidelines project, it was filmed on the Zuiderstrand in The Hague. I am drawing the wave pattern as it comes in over my paper.
The Tidelines project is a three year project looking at rising sea levels through the movement of tides over my paper. The drawings are conceptual in nature, they literally capture the tidal image flowing over sheets of paper. Each drawing is made for approximately five minutes every five minutes, I move my drawing position down the beach for each drawing with the ebb and flood of the water. The duration is usually several hours at either ebb or flood or at the cusp of these two.
I made these drawings at specific locations along the coast, beginning with the Zuiderstrand in The Hague and continuing further south to Zealand before moving to Oostende in Belgium and finally the île de Ré on the Atlantic coast of France. These are all locations under the threat of flooding. The île de Ré has already experienced severe flooding in recent times.
The drawings are collated in books as a timed series. The dynamism of tidal movement is captured in single line drawings. From this memory of tides I am creating a concrete result. It is both an almost scientific visual recording of an event and it is an artistic interpretation of these locations, I am recording the anatomy of these tides. This project was made with the kind help of numerous sources, the initial reading lists provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and of course the recommendations of Eddy Moors Rector IHE Delft Institute for Water Education & President of the Global Network of Water Museums, who generously contributed an introduction to the artist’s book accompanying this project. My thanks to all those who have helped me realise both the book and the project, a particularly huge thanks to those contributed and those who helped crowdfund the Tidelines: Wave Mapping book.
The video above was filmed Michèle Bergsma.