Newhaven Open: Gin Rimmington Jones

“Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories so far.” Doreen Massey

On the western fringes of Newhaven is a beautiful, wild landscape where cycles of erosion, collapse and regeneration play out across deep time and space. This work was made for Photo Fringe over six visits from mid-August, allowing me to encounter the beach at different tides, times and in changing weather. The idea was to create images that respond to a space always in flux, unfixed and surprising. Towering chalk cliffs, some 87 million years old, rise dazzlingly above the dark flint pebbles of the beach. Rivulets of liquid orange clay slip down their face from the younger sediments above. At low tide, a network of eroded chalk fins and gullies are exposed, teeming with life, and seabirds perch at their edges.

With each visit I went deeper into being with the beach, a body moving through its shifting, unfixed terrain, fascinated by the tiny changes I noticed, lost in its spell for hours. These photographs, like the landscape, hold multiple moments and encounters without resolving them into a single view. Somewhere between the materiality of the beach and the photographs made from it is another space that is uncertain, perceptual and imagined, through which I try to understand something of my own brief presence within deep time.

The work is ongoing.

Image credit: Gin Rimmington Jones, On Becoming, archival pigment print on Shikainame Japanese paper