As a child

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

G.V.Actually, the sea for me is linked to childhood, even now. It has the properties to draw me back into childhood. My body becomes different – because of the gravity that is different.

I was born in Norway. The first year of my life we lived in Fyresdal → which is next to a huge lake in the middle of the forest. So I’ve (almost) lived my whole life in Ostend – except of this first year.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

M.B. It might be best if I start by spluttering and stammering in trying to speak about the ocean. As such vocal and abstract noises reflect my inability to satisfactorily describe the deep connections I have with the ocean going way back to my childhood. This includes the sea as well as the ocean, as the difference and connections between these two watery entities are important to recognize. You cannot have one without the other and both are intricately connected. My sea legs and my oceanic feelings combine to dance this special kind of jig.

At Half Moon Bay near where I lived in Melbourne as a kid, there’s a sunken battle ship (a relic from WW1). One can either swim or walk to the ship depending on the level of the tide. The ship is called the ‘Cerberus’ and is the name of the mythological dog that protects the doors of the underworld. This half sunken wreck protrudes from the sea and its presence connects in my memory to so many strange sea fantasies I’ve read in poetry and literature over the years, including the sea voyages described by Rabelais.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The great modernist Australian painter Clarice Beckett, who for many years was not well known, did a series of paintings in the 1930s of the very same beaches that I played on many years later during my childhood. Beckett’s work is quite unique, and for me, evokes many vivid visual and atmospheric impressions of my time spent on these beaches. Her painting techniques are deemed to be very innovative for the time; she used a distinctive flattened, fuzzy and abstract method of applying color in her landscapes. When I was a child of 8 or 9, my parents enrolled me in a local painting class that was held in a neighbor's house looking over the sea, and this was only attended by local women, mainly housewives. I like to think Beckett’s spirit was present in these classes somehow.

Throughout my childhood I would submerge myself in the sea according to different parts of my body. As a toddler, I was told to not go deeper than my knees and a few years later no deeper than my belly button (NAVEL NAVAL) until I was up to my neck in the water in my teens. And all the time I would spend hours snorkeling over the surface, peering down into the water upon all the various seaweed and rock formations.

Also throughout my childhood, I would use a thin circular piece of wood to skip, skid and slide over the surface of shallow water on the beach. Surfing is a popular thing to do in Australia but I never really tried it other than body surfing, which is when you use the whole body as a kind of board and are carried by the force of breaking waves. It’s a bit like flying by the force of the sea and reminds me of the flying fish that one sees in the South Pacific.

I was into rock pooling as a kid also, meaning I’d observe for hours what lives within the rock pools when the tide is out, and also during the night. One night I even discovered tiny sea worms that would explode instantly when exposed to torch light. This marine phenomena seemed to defy all reasonable explanation as I could not find information about such a sea creature ever existing. I’ve always wondered if it was only a waking sea dream.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

Although I spent some of my childhood holidays by the sea → I am a very good swimmer. I spent a lot of time swimming in rivers: particularly in Cheshire, England. I have a strong relationship to water but more to fresh water than to seawater.

P.v.C. When I was young, I was a fisherman (until my 40s).

T.v.A To start, I want to say that I’m totally in love with the ocean. I’m also very afraid of it. Or, rather, I’m in awe of it. It’s the most fantastic body that exists. When I was small, it was my parents that first brought me to the sea.
(It was in Middlekerke: we had an apartment there where we used to go for the summer.)