all images by Roger Mullin unless otherwise noted
pier, I was keen to complete a project in water space. In the dimension of the high tide we were able to delineate the pier that once was, bringing the Spencer's Island community together to dwell in our connection to history and the world via the wonder of the ocean. At low tide a kind of non-site emerged, of the kind described by Robert Smithson as, “the site is where a piece should be but isn’t. 4 Some 300 feet from the wrack line, working not so much in littoral space but rather the ocean floor – a benthic zone of the depths, felt uncanny. Surrounded by a horizonless fog-blanketed space we implemented what we previously rehearsed the night before, the moon having worked all the while to pull the mass of the ocean out and away and the sun, slowly replacing the dark of night. 5 There, at the shoulder of the tidal change, with the sea around us, 6 we set up anchors and guy-ropes that would later tighten as the sea slowly set the rising floats into the outline of the pier. We staged our production in the six hours we had until high tide. Walter de Maria’s 1977 project, Lightening Field , sings when lightning strikes and similarly, the shape of our pier is most clear just when the rising tide begins to fall. At 6am on our final day we began by setting a fire high up on the beach along a rim of seaweed left from the last high tide. We had publicised the event, inviting community members from Spencer’s Island and all along the shore to join us to tell stories of the pier and share in a late morning campfire coffee. With the beach as our stage we became actors, co- mingling with our audience while we worked.
Around noon, the beach fire we set six hours earlier was extinguished, the tide was at its highest and with the floats aligned our project was complete.
Community collaborators: Laurie Currie, Devin MacGillivary, Paul Callison. Students: Charles Bourne, Chelsea Kinnee, Cameron Edwards, Kelly Doleman, Brennan Jelinski, Branden Schick, Adryn Galambos, Paulette Cameron, Yuqi Zhong, George Grant, Kevin Mockford, Rita Wang
4 Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, 'Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson', Avalanche 1/1 (1970). Reprinted in Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson , p. 177. 5 Ocean’s Tides Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RdkXs8BibE 6 Rachel Carson. The Sea Around Us . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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