Ongoing project / Reykjavík / 2023Oceanic Obsession began with a world that existed somewhere between imagination and the sea.
A world I built through fragments, stories, and longing.
At its centre are two witches, born from this project,
two characters whose lives unfolded as I began to imagine
what might exist between the ocean and the shore.
Two soulmate witches, bound to one another by the tides.
One lives in the ocean.
The other lives on the shore.
They can only meet when the tide rises,
when the ocean reaches the shore
and the distance between them disappears.
When the tide retreats, they are separated again.
But their longing remains.
The work explores beauty as something fluid.
Something that is not inherent, fixed, or universally agreed upon,
but shaped by perception, context, and the gaze.
We are taught what to value.
We are surrounded by images, objects, and ideas
that tell us what is beautiful, desirable, and worth keeping.
But what happens when we look again?
What happens when the discarded becomes precious?
Throughout the process, I became interested in broken objects,
forsaken materials, and overlooked fragments.
Rather than transforming them beyond recognition,
I wanted to give them a new context,
to pause, observe, and reveal what was already there.
Like something discovered on the shore,
beauty can exist quietly beneath our expectations,
waiting to be noticed.
The ocean witch searches the depths for forgotten things,
fragments, broken objects, discarded materials.
Things that have been overlooked,
things that have lost their original purpose.
She sees something in them that others do not.
She gathers these fragments and sends them to the shore,
carried by the waves.
The shore witch receives them
and transforms them into adornments.
She makes sculptures in the sand,
writes poems for her lover,
and leaves traces of her presence along the shore.
When the tide returns, the ocean carries these creations away,
preserving fragments of her imagination
and bringing them back to the one who waits beneath the surface.
Their relationship became the starting point for Oceanic Obsession, a jewellery collection shaped by longing,
exchange, and the space between the sea and the shore.
The jewellery became a reflection of the witches themselves:
mysterious, intimate, imperfect, and shaped by the ocean.
Each piece carries something of their relationship,
the ocean witch's fascination with forgotten treasures
and the shore witch's impulse to transform, collect, and create.
The collection grew beyond jewellery.
I spent time in the intertidal landscape,
collecting what I came to call going beachcombing,
searching the shore for fragments and treasures.
Through photography, moving image, poetry, sculpture,
and bookmaking, I continued to build their world
and trace their longing for one another.
Oceanic Obsession became a way of exploring
not only the relationship between two witches,
but the relationship between seeing and valuing.
An object becomes a fragment.
The fragment becomes a form.
The form becomes something precious.
Beauty does not always need to be created.
Sometimes it only needs to be revealed.
