Curú
Waiting to dive
I recently found a sketchbook in a box under the bed at my mum’s house, and these two images fell out of the pages.
I took them on a sandy beach in Costa Rica the summer before heading to Brighton to study. That was in Curú Bay Nature Reseve on the Nicoya Peninsula. I’d spent most of the year leading up to it working and saving up so that I could train as PADI open water diver. Once qualified I could then help on a conservation project helping to position aritifical base sections of reef made from old car tyres, that were designed to encourage coral to grow back.
But before we could get enough underwater hours for our diving qualifications, the lead instructor on the project walked off and abandoned the project along with our ambitions of reef restoration. We were left to entertain ourselves above water, waiting to see if another instructor might be found.
I can’t remember exactly how we filled those days, but finding the sketchbook I kept in Costa Rica was happy reminder of a particular afternoon I spent aborbed in driftwood, collecting and arranging it in the wet sand before the tide came in again. An epheramal composition that felt right at the time. Looking back I wonder if it might have been some kind of subconcious sequal to Plaster Longs perhaps? Certainly Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy influences there!
year: 2001