ARTIST'S STATEMENT
This work in progress represents a decade of photographing Maritime beaches: New River Beach, Roseway Beach, The Hawk Beach, Sand Pebble Island Beach, Summerville Beach, Welkum Beach, Sandhills Beach Provincial Park, Sandy Point Beach. My study is a casual be(ach)sotted investigation of people of the Maritimes in the places they love best -- at the water's edge in sunshine embodying their bodies and letting their hair down.
Beaches are everything! When we go to a beach the world falls away. . .
I wanted to capture something traditional (for what is more so, arguably, than a Maritimer on a beach? -- other than maybe a Maritimer on a boat?) and radical (because photographing people when they are truly at ease reveals what has helped define their characters, community, and identify). What emerges is beach goers -- east coasters, newcomers, and visitors alike -- at ease in their skin and their natural environment. They move freer, stretch, skip, sprawl, run, twirl, walk, and swim. They lollygag and stuff sand between their toes. They beach-comb and bask in the sun's rays and warm breezes. They inch out into the vast ocean expanse, letting waves crash over them, and run and dive in, head first.
Spend time on a beach and you'll find yourself transported and even a little transformed. We are more present here. We lose our inhibitions and access deep-seated parts of ourselves that existed long before modern concerns. We understand at a bodily level that beaches feed our souls and help reinvigorate us. They free us for a time. And we belong there.
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When I was young, my mother studied painting with an Italian master in Brockville, Ontario, where we lived. He made us strange dry spaghetti at his home one evening with an impressive library flanked by stairs on either side and spanning an open air loft tucked in a soaring cathedral ceiling that amazed me. I always played outside (on our country property and in fields and the woods) so I often looked up and marvelled at the beautiful sunsets and clouds formations -- and after that night I'd think 'paintings can't rival Nature's compositions!' Surely beaches are among the most beautiful of Nature's sea-and-land-scapes.
The Maritime's beaches are incomparable -- firstly, there are so many of them, around every corner it seems, stretching for miles with fine white sand, especially on Nova Scotia's South West Shore.
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Years ago, I bought a parcel of old growth forest near Mabou, Cape Breton, and began dreaming of homesteading there. But when I started visiting New River Beach with my friends David and David each Summer, I began to realize I would prefer to live with a water view. So in 2021 I bought a little Nova Scotia cottage with a peak-a-boo view of a harbour and started discovering all the amazing beaches nearby. I wanted to photograph them all!
This budding collection, still in development, expresses my desire to capture something of the magic I have experienced while visiting the Maritime's beaches: bliss on display everywhere; children enjoying the sun, surf and sea; bodies sprawling and in action, moving in abandon; mothers with their children loosed or in tow, sharing the joys of beach living; weathered washed-up finds; waves pulsing like our own beating hearts. And then there's the patterns that are etched so delicately in the sands by the rising and falling waters, creating an ever ready supply of Navajo sand painting facsimiles.
The colours! Wherever sand meets sea meets sky amazing shades of blues and turquoises and hues of purples and mauves are born; ochres and yellows in the sands abound, and greys and whites dotted by inky black speckles punctuate the stones; there are taupes and golds in the pebbles; and of course the browns of earth and the greens frame the edges in coastal foliage and the forests beyond.
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It all takes my breath away!
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Sadly, however, North's fast melting glaciers are increasing the world's coastal water levels and dramatic rises are expected in as early as the next 10 years. What this will mean for our beautiful beaches won't be good. While this body of work doesn't intend to be ecologically purposeful, per say, I do hope these photos might help draw some attention to the urgent actions that our climate and our beaches need from all of us.
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I hope you'll enjoy my photographs as much as I have enjoyed taking them - and will visit a Maritime beach sometime soon!
P.S.: Don't forget to leave only footprints in the sand.
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-- Sandra Bell