This project “Sea Change” is intended to show a natural process in action, landscape in motion. The tides are one of the planet’s great natural rhythms, transforming coastlines twice a day. The camera that remains through ebb and flood enables us to observe simultaneously two moments in time, two states of nature. I hope these photographs will stimulate a sense of landscape as dynamic process rather than static image. They also warn of global warming. The flood tide covers the tidelands and immediately recedes; rising sea levels will flood our shores and not recede for thousands of years.
The coast of Britain experiences tides that vary from 1 metre in some places to 15 metres – the third highest tides in the world – in the Bristol Channel. The time between low and high tide averages 6 hours and 20 minutes, and the photographs in these diptychs were usually take on the same day or consecutive days.