'The Waves' 1996 (Based on Virginia Woolf's novel)

12x16" Black & White fibre-based photograph with hand-written quotes from the novel underneath each image (28 in series)

"Now is life very solid, or very shifting?"
(Virginia Woolf, Diary, 1929)

As a modernist text, 'The Waves' dispenses with the traditional forms of the realist novel. Instead, the six characters establish themselves by their own thought patterns, and it is through their fragmented streams of consciousness that we trace their development from childhood to middle age. Their contrasting urban and rural experiences are dispersed with recurring imagery associated with each character; such as the petals that float in Rhoda's basin, which symbolise ships on the ocean and are each accompanied with a handwritten quotation written underneath each image.

By finding a poetic, visual language to echo the mood of the text itself, we follow three of the characters lives, drawing attention to central existential issues of identity, reflecting the all pervading sense of English melancholy associated with Woolf's pre-occupation with life and death and the complexities of human experience. Indeed, the "..roaring waters upon which we build our crazy platforms" form the underlying rhythm of the sea in the novel and refers to the analogy drawn between life's intensities and periods of lull and the rise and fall of the waves.

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