V&A Acquisition, A Daily Sea
London’s V&A Museum, one of the world’s leading museums of art and design, have just acquired a portfolio of my A Daily Sea photographs, a work I made during the Covid-19 national lockdown. The portfolio was a gift of Jim & Ruth Grover, and joins two other portfolios of prints the Museum brought into their Collection earlier this year (read more).
About A Daily Sea:
A photograph looking out to sea from Brighton beach taken daily between the 19th March 2020 when the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK started. The series continued for 56 days until the 13th May when official Government advice changed in England and the lockdown was lifted. The original series of photographs were posted daily on Instagram accompanied by a sea-related poem/quote and made available as limited-edition fundraising prints to raise money for the NHS Covid-19 Urgent Appeal.
The photographs in the portfolio represent an extended meditation on this most significant time in our shared history. Through the repetition of daily seascapes, itself a meditative act, we see one sea in 56 ways, sometimes rough and tumultuous, other times serene and mellow, from dawn to dusk. The photographs of this ever-changing body of water are unified by one horizon throughout; the remarkable point at which the sea seems to touch the sky. In the final portfolio piece the daily pairing of sea view with a related text are accompanied by the daily and cumulative coronavirus mortality figures from the Office for National Statistics.
