My Plunge into the Earth
In my memory and an imagined future, I fly out my window and west, over the sea. I know how it feels. I have done it before in my dreams.
I am barreling down the overgrown laneway, gravity or tidal forces pulling me there. Briars snag on my clothing and the sharp air sends my tears backwards in streams sewn from sea silver behind me. The earth and the tangles of brambles and the high walls fall away and the sea is there and the lunar light dances for me in ribbons on its surface. The sound of the water washing over me. I could always hear it but it is louder now. And the giant glittering sky. The stars were always there but I can see them now. Infinity has been waiting for me between the high walls.
Am I here or do I remember it? Did I invent it? Did I build it with the atoms of my mind? Is it lying dormant within me like potential energy? Will it erupt from me like a supernova, creating every element in a blaze of light and heat?
I missed the sea and the stars. Crowds of people and city lights don’t feel the same. I sit on a rock and I cry into the ocean, and with my tears I make infinity larger. I like to imagine that the bay holds me. It welcomes me home. Still, the Atlantic, always west. The abyss is right there. How comforting to be at the edge of something. The abyss is now.
At my feet the water dances around the rocks in a hypnotising whirl. When I look down I can see my reflection on the surface of a rock pool. A whole universe above the surface and a whole universe beneath. The spiral galaxies and supernovae of the cosmos above. The periwinkles and plumes of algae of the microcosm below (1).
In Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Art and Lies’ (2), she said that the shell and the stone are “all of art and mathematics”. I can’t decide which is which. Which parts of me are shell and which parts are stone? Is logic my bedrock and creativity the iridescent shell? Or is mathematics the language of the patterns of nature and art the perennial constant of my life?
I imagine my body as the earth rising out of the sea like an ancient giant (3). I imagine myself as the rock goddess from Ithell Colquhoun’s ‘Attributes of the Moon’ (4), emerging from some deep cave to bask in the lunar glow. But I don’t possess any ancient wisdom. I didn’t feel a divine connection to nature until I started to paint it, to transform it into something else (5). Could I create something from nothing? Could I create myself from chunks of earth?
I stand on the black jagged rocks, the crisp air whipping the sea foam to a peak. The waves crack and spray all around me. I think of Ana Mendieta in her 1974 film, ‘Ocean Bird (Washup)’ (6). She is naked and covered in feathers and she lets the waves toss her body until she is deposited on the shore. Did she feel free in the cold water, like I often do when I flee to the sea, or did she let the waves wash her where they would in an act of surrender to the tide? Could she fly in her dreams?
You couldn’t swim here. I wouldn’t trust this razor sharp edge with my body. I wonder if Mendieta succeeded in what she wanted to say. I wonder if the world could ever see a woman’s body and see it as just a body. What can I say with my body that cannot be said with paint?
Heavy deep clouds try to suffocate the bright sky now but the sun persists and interrogates the earth. The whole world is in high contrast. I can see all of its colours. I can see its infinities clearly.
After a high tide or a storm tangled knots of seaweed end up washed onto the rocky shores, sparkling as they splay over the stones. Vibrant reds and golds of the fronds draped in their emotive drama.
In my studio I paint an explosion. I try to create destruction. A flash in a vibrating field of dark. The burst has glistening fronds and floats of air lifting it to the surface. Jagged shards fly outwards. From the heart of the explosion everything emerges.
With cyanotype I capture the flash of the instant. The burning shadow. The seaweed was there. It is not now. But here. Proof. I cut it into fragments. The fragments suspend in time and space. Debris after the moment of explosion.
I take a video. In my tiny screen the waves crash onto the shore covered in the seaweed wreckage tossed up in the storm. I pick up shells. I’m trying to take something home in my pocket. My mum beside me in real life and now also in the video says “This is your home, Lilymay, this is yours”. It doesn’t just belong to me, it is me.
I try to suspend myself in time and space.
There is a network of caves deep below the earth where I now sit and write (7). I write it into being, “I, creature of echoing caverns that I am” (8). Glowing pools create light shows on the ceilings. Stalagmites and stalactites reach for one another across millennia. In each vast cavern lives the work I have not yet made. Each object shines and spins beneath my feet, charged with potential energy. Endless drapes of embroidered and painted tapestries create environments like Vivian Suter (9). Dancing sculptures dapple light and intricate shadows on the walls. Each day when I trawl the shoreline for inspiration in the pools between the rocks, I imagine a cracking open in the ribcage of the landscape (10). I am searching for a “plunge into the earth” to discover a place where I am eternal and where I might create myself.
In ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’ John Steinbeck (1951, p. 162) observes
"Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”
Steinbeck’s observations of the relationship between the microcosm of a rockpool and the macro scale of the cosmos, reflect a recurring motif in my work. My mathematical study always led me to a preoccupation with infinity and infinitesimals. Reading this passage leads me to the comforting belief that this connection is inevitable, that anyone who spent long enough staring into the swirling water of a rockpool, would begin to dream of outer space.
(1994, p. 57)
Inis Tuaisceart is the northernmost island of the Blasket Islands in County Kerry, Ireland. It is also nicknamed ‘An Fear Marbh’, the dead man with his head pointing out to the Atlantic (MacCarthy, 2018). Similar images of giants being turned to stone or islands coming alive appear often in Irish folklore. In ‘Song of the Sea’ (2014) by Cartoon Saloon, the giant Mac Lir is turned to stone by his mother to save him from his grief after the death of his wife. Mac Lir is later reanimated and returns to the spirit world, perhaps Hy-brasil or Tír na nÓg. As with many cultures worldwide, Irish folklore demonstrates the personification of the land and our deep corporeal connection with the earth.
(1947)
In her 1972 essay ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, Shelley B. Ortner (1974) makes a case that the subjugation of women across cultures across time, is rooted in the positioning of women as closer to “nature”, while men are identified with “culture”. She argues that culture, “human consciousness and its products”, is the creation of systems which help humans to overcome and conquer nature and so by associating women with nature, cultures begin to form ideologies which devalue women. I have always felt sceptical of a type of feminist thought which sees women as possessing divine knowledge and an attunement with nature to which men do not have access. This type of thinking can lead to gender essentialist ideologies and often engages with logic, which when followed to its conclusions, arrives again to the very ideas which lead to the oppression of women in the first place. By reinforcing female primitivity and reducing the female body to the site of reproduction of the species, while men must find ways to externalise this creative force, this negates women’s art and cultural contribution. I continue to grapple with the tension I feel between the inspiration I draw from the natural world and the landscape of my home in my artwork and reinforcing what I view to be harmful ideas veiled as feminist imagery. I feel as though I am inspired by nature because I am a human being who has only come to be distinct from nature by the process of social construction. In a speech in , Ursula K. Le Guin said
"I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?"
Le Guin’s argument applies also when thinking about “occultist” female artists whose practices were deeply rooted in spirituality. Hilma Af Klint stated that she created ‘The Ten Largest’ paintings under instructions from her spirit guides. As described in Jennifer Higgie’s book ‘The Other Side’, to be a medium implies passivity and lack of agency, indicating that the only way to make sense of a woman's creativity or ideation is to sublimate it as a prophesy or a vision communicated by an otherworldly being. This is not to say that spiritualism, goddess worship or a deep connection to the land are inherently anti-feminist, as all have deep cultural roots in many indigenous and pre-colonial cultures, but it is important to note and examine why much of women’s art exists within this thematic tradition. Higgie also makes the point that the relegation of spiritualism may be in part due to its association with women and with liberation movements.
(1974)
In ‘The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further’ by Lavina Greenlaw (2025, p. 7), she describes the cave as “an interruption and a release” in the landscape.
“As a child wandering along the beach, I would be looking for drama: not so much for something to happen as for something to mean something.”
In this way, when a cave appears as an interruption in the coastal landscape it becomes a portal towards meaning. Clarice Lispector also makes reference to caves in ‘Água Viva’ (2014, p. 8).
“And if I often paint caves that is because they are my plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with brightness…”
In ‘Água Viva’, she often plays with the written word, making reference to the present moment of her writing and to her power to conjure images in the mind of the reader.
(Lispector, 2014, p. 9)
Vivian Suter is an Argentine-Swiss artist who makes paintings from her rainforest studio on a former coffee plantation in Panajachel, Guatemala. She often paints outdoors, using rainwater to dilute her paints and allowing the elements to have a hand in her painting process. She arranges her unstretched canvases in the gallery to create an environment reminiscent of their tropical origins. In this way, nature becomes both the subject of the artwork and the artist itself as Suter uses the natural environment as an extension of her body in the art-making process.
In ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’ John Steinbeck (1941, p. 94) describes a search for meaning that emerged while scouring the tide pools along the Gulf of California.
“The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. "What did you lose?" they ask.
"Nothing."
"Then what do you search for?" And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another.”
Steinbeck points out that the very act of peering down into a rock pool creates the bodily movement of searching for something lost. I have often found that time spent embodying the search has led to clarity on unanswered questions about my creative practice. The imagery of a rock pool has come to embody the process of enquiry and investigation for me.
Bibliography
Bruni, L. (2022) ‘The Body of the Land’, in D. Pih (ed.) Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism. London: Tate Publishing.
Colquhoun, I. (1947) Attributes of the Moon [Oil paint on wood]. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/colquhoun-attributes-of-the-moon-t15315.
Colquhoun, I. (1961) Goose of Hermogenes. Reprint. London: Pushkin Press, 2025.
Greenlaw, L. (2025) The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.
Hale, A. (2022) ‘The Earth is a Woman and She Will Rise: Imagining Pagan Ritual and the Body of the Goddess’, in D. Pih (ed.) Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism. London: Tate Publishing.
Higgie, J. (2024) The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Lispector, C. (2014) Água Viva. Translated from the Portuguese by S. Tobler. London: Penguin Classics
MacCarthy, D. (2018) ‘The Islands of Ireland: Dead man’s island’, Irish Examiner, 2 April, Available at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/property/homeandgardens/arid-30835290.html (Accessed: 13 April 2025).
Mendieta, A. (1974) Ocean Bird (Washup) [Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent Running time: 4:09 minutes]
Mendieta, A. (1974) Ocean Bird (Washup) [Still image from film] Available at: https://www.thecollector.com/spirituality-art-ana-mendieta/
The Outrun (2024) Directed by N. Fingscheidt. [Feature Film] StudioCanal
Ortner, S. (1974) Is female to male as nature is to culture? In M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, culture, and society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 68-87.
Song of the Sea (2014) Directed by T. Moore. [Feature film] StudioCanal
Steinbeck, J. and Ricketts, E. (1941) The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Penguin Books
Winterson, J. (1995) Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
I write it into being
Microcosm
‘Attributes of the Moon’, Ithell Colquhoun, 1947
‘Ocean Bird (Washup)’, Ana Mendieta, 1974
Taking shells home in my pocket