FOUR SHORES
An Edge Cartography of Temporal Worlds
No. 0001 | Temporal Worlds | Jun 6
Gun metal grey skies and gun metal geys seas, Gulf of Bothnia. 2023.
The shoal beacon stood alone against the layered greys of sea and sky. Beyond it, little could be distinguished with certainty.
The Gulf of Bothnia has long been a working landscape of crossings, channels and submerged hazards, where direction is often inferred rather than seen. In the fading winter light, the marker appeared less as an object than as a point of orientation within a larger field of uncertainty.
Greyness. That was part of what made me leave England, and what kept me away for much of my life. Grey felt dull, flattening. It made everything feel half alive. I wanted blue. So I went in search of it.
Grey was also part of why I first picked up a camera — as a way of moving toward something else, something clearer, something brighter.
And yet greyness, as colour, atmosphere, and condition, is more compelling than I once thought. It is quiet, expansive, and luminous.
Less like something to escape, and more like something returning.
Northern Europe, with its long grey winters and subdued light, now draws me. Greyness is no longer what I move away from. It is what I am returning to.
Lost in translation. A loud dream, carefully maintained in a quiet country. On the road to Uusikaupunki, Finland. 2023
The white Chevrolet Bel Air belonged to another geography entirely. Yet here it was, moving through the forests of western Finland beneath a strong northern light.
Its shape carried something of the 1970s with it — a decade encountered first through radio broadcasts, album covers and television screens. Places arrived long before they could be visited. The wider world existed as fragments of sound and image, received at a distance.
Along the Gulf of Bothnia coast, the car felt less like a relic than a surviving signal from that period, still travelling.
The 1970s sit in memory like a shifting broadcast signal — unstable, buzzing, constantly re-tuning itself. Years carried on radio waves, received and imagined. From early Elton John to late Led Zeppelin, from Genesis to Yes, music seemed to be growing ever more ambitious, complex and expansive. Then came The Police.
Everything was changing in real time. Punk arrived abruptly, fragmented into post-punk and new wave, then dissolved again into cooler electronic forms. Each year the tone of the airwaves seemed to reset.
It was also a decade of waiting — of wanting to move, to leave school, to get out into a wider geography that existed only in fragments: album sleeves, magazines, television screens, and late-night radio. The world arrived first as sight and sound, and from it emerged imagined possibilities.
And cars defined that decade as much as the music. Objects of desire. Those big Valiants, Chevrolets and Fords. Another current running through the world — a different translation of the same dream. In western Finland, American muscle cars became something more than imported machinery.
They were adopted, maintained and folded into local life. Big Detroit forms moving slowly along empty forest roads beneath northern skies, not as imitation but as continuation. The V8 became part of the landscape: not foreign, but integrated. A shared language of movement and visibility in places otherwise defined by quiet restraint.
West
Where this story begins.
BRITAIN
—a reckoning with origin
— the homeland as foreign
Paradise Street. Bradford. Google Maps Street View. 2021
1963. Britain as birthplace, but later something that pushed outward. Early memories: dry stone walls, grass fields in summer, cow pats, fireworks, bonfires, toffee. Castles, nursery rhymes, television, Silver Shadows and Mini Coopers. Yorkshire, Lancashire. The War of the Roses — history already present in the landscape. Captivating terrain for a young boy.
The annual journeys south were different. France felt elsewhere. The aroma of coffee, croissants, Sunday markets. A distinct shift in light, in smell, in temperature of perception.
France was the first sense of another world. England was no longer the only measure.
By 1975, the impulse to leave had already set. What followed was drift. The ontology of drift.
THE ONTOLOGY OF DRIFT
1963
Bradford, England
1975 – 1983
Johannesburg, South Africa
1984
London
1985
Johannesburg
1986-1988
London
1989 – 1997
Hong Kong
1997 – 1999
Johannesburg
2000
New York
2001 – 2003
Cape Town, South Africa
2004
Paris
2005
Cape Town
2006
Bangkok / Seoul
2007-2008
Cape Town
2009-2016
Saigon, Vietnam
2017
Phuket
2018-2022
Penang, Malaysia
2023
Saigon
2024
Taipei, Taiwan
2025-2026
Penang, Malaysia
2027
Lithuania, England, Scandinavia
Be carried. Be borne. Stray, digress, diverge, veer. Sidetrack as method, not accident.
Not flow. Something else. Resistance inside movement. Movement against its own current.
There are those who choose it deliberately. The side tracks. The unclear routes. The spaces where direction loosens and the world stops confirming itself. Forest edges.
Unmarked ground. The narrowing of certainty.
Distance changes the system of thought. The further from home, the less stable the internal map becomes. Fear arrives in fragments, not conclusions. It does not stop movement. It sharpens it.
Between places, between decisions. Gravitation and relocation as repeating forces. Push and pull. North to south. East to west. Light to dark, then back again without resolution.
What is left is drift — not as idea, but as condition. Something that happens when direction stops behaving like certainty.
Sailing. Helsinki to Stockholm. 2024
Passengers drift aboard the Silja Symphony.
They are braced against the cold sea breeze, feeling its chill as they reason with winter sitting just beyond the horizon.
As dusk draws in, the sky deepens into purple, edging the polar blue of the sea.
The autumnal full moon rises into an open sky above the crossing. The ship continues through the darkening water.
The images live as the selected works and archive at
where it continues to unfold as an evolving collection.
