Oysters

The ongoing Oysters series began with a trip to Montijo, a Lisbon suburb by the Tejo (Tagus) river, where I found among the usual river debris an enormous quantity of oyster shells on the sand. These aquatic suburbs have this melancholy about them, sleepy places of working people that come and go over the river in a daily routine and nightmarish schedule from home to work and back again, unable to access any sense of the sublime in the landscape surrounding them.

The focus of this series is exploring the beauty in the rocky things no one cares when casually walking on the suburban beaches. Their irregularity reminds me of little landscape scale models that I can use in a similar way to Cennino Cennini (1370-1440) when he advised using rocks on a table-top as a substitute for real landscapes.