The Swelling of the Sea | Furthest West - The Atlantic Ocean | Point Ardnamurchan, Scotland | The West-most point of mainland Great Britain 1990 - 2001
Dimensions: image: 732 x 1040 mm
Copyright: © Thomas Joshua Cooper | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Thomas Joshua Cooper's black and white photograph, "The Swelling of the Sea," captures the Atlantic off Scotland. It feels so turbulent and vast; what do you see in this piece? Curator: The ocean, especially as rendered here, holds potent symbolic weight. Think of the sea as a boundary, a threshold. How does Cooper use light and shadow to evoke feelings of the sublime, the awe-inspiring, yet also the potentially terrifying? Editor: I see that... the darkness above and the churning water give it a double meaning. I guess I see both sides. Curator: Precisely. It can signify both the vast unknown and the powerful forces shaping our world, reflecting cultural anxieties and hopes about exploration and the natural world. Editor: I hadn't considered that the ocean could be so laden with our emotions and history. Curator: It is a powerful reminder of the enduring human fascination with the sea, its depths, and its symbolism.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cooper-the-swelling-of-the-sea-furthest-west-the-atlantic-ocean-point-ardnamurchan-p78606
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In 1990, Thomas Joshua Cooper undertook a circumnavigation of Scotland to coincide with Glasgow’s year as the European City of Culture. This photograph, showing the ocean off Point Ardnamurchan in Scotland, was taken during this trip. Along with another image in Tate’s collection, South-most Arrival - The English Channel | At the hour of the Total Solar Eclipse, but the Day Before | Bumble Rock, Lizard Point, Cornwall | The South-most Point of Mainland Great Britain 2001 (Tate P78605), this work is representative of his body of photographs which show the view from the furthermost edges of the British Isles. In The Swelling of the Sea, the water appears as an all-over pattern, a long-exposure softening the waves so that they resemble smoke or soft brushstrokes. The pale foreground of the image fades into an inky blackness, these murky depths evoking ideas of the sublime.
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