Politics in the UK have been particularly divisive in the last 10 years or so, singling out and villainising various minority groups of people in our society.
I was prompted to be thinking about this in early 2025 while I was on many of my coastal visits making versions of the ‘Welcome’ volume of work that I have been completing over the past the last 25 years.
With a prompt from Lyndon, (the person behind SU4IP) through his open call to submit work to an artist book called Basalt, I considered how I could start a new piece of work that would allow me to communicate some of how I was feeling about aspects of politics.
While studying horticulture, I was afforded the opportunity to attend a lecture on bedrock, how it formed and how it changes over time to form the base of soils that are required for life on earth. I pondered on how rock is neutral, it has no care of politics be that leaning to the left or to the right, it is simply just there. In the world that I inhabit, as the many stones in the garden, or on the beach, each as individuals but collectively making up the beach that shifts with the changing wind, current and force of the sea. The beach exists as one
entity, comprised of billions of individuals, much like our global human community.
I considered genetic make up, how the diversity in this is as great as the numbers of humans that currently exist, and have ever existed, the eight billion number that is attached to our current population being just the tip of the iceberg of human numbers through millennia, each human being valid and different, playing their part in the chain of evolution. Each stone while entirely different in shape, size weight, make up, and other factors, not having greater or lesser importance than the next.
I questioned that as humans we do not always seem to have a positive approach to individuals. What they look like or where they are from are not always seen as the beautiful positives that they are. I was reminded of an adage, that ‘we have more in common with each other than what divides us’. When we are together we are stronger, much like a bundle of sticks, which is harder to break than the sticks individually.
A beach made of tiny individuals pebbles, all shifting and moving, may be constantly changing shape, but it withstands the test of time, a beach can stretch miles and has the ability through its adaptions to last for millennia, weathering all storms, unity being the force that underpins its longevity.
Portiphillio 