Mark Adams
Photography

This is as good as it gets:
this cold fog over the water, this pale companion to the dreams I can’t forgetand never quite recall

— from “Haar”, by John Burnside. 

The meteorological phenomenon of sea fret (referred to locally as Haar) occurs in the North East and Scotland during spring, suggests the sublimity of nature when cold fog from the North Sea accumulates and meets the warmer area of the land. These images explore the ambiguity created by these conditions recorded on colour photographic film.

The sea leads elsewhere, its narrative mediates between the extremes - perilous journeys and escapist fantasies. The horizon obscured by fog suggests an abstract boundary which separates one land from another.

This indeterminate border delivers travellers from elsewhere sometimes in a quest for sanctuary. Pictorially, these photographic images deny any specific demarcations and look instead towards a merging of binaries - sea and land, here and elsewhere, the local and the global, the familiar and the exotic.