Sherds Shards Shorelines

With Holocene sunsets

New materials wash

across

our shores

Continued sedimentation of humanity

Ancient intermingling

salt,

stone,

seaweed,

shell

Cast wide –

a strange catch of sherds

Cast deep –

a strange haul of shards

Fragmentary people

With broken vessels

Cross the line,

tread with care

Tide hides,

washes removes

different ways

Tide Reveals,

recedes deposits

new realities

 

with

plastic in our hands

mould marine disrespects.

 

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The Sherds and Shards were found in July 2017 on the shoreline of a small cove on the east side of Eilean Na Hearadh (Isle of Harris) in the Na h-Eileanan Siar (Western Isles).   Overlooking the cove is a house, that originates from the late 18th century, the waste from which was probably flung by its residents into the sea for over two hundred years.    The sherds and shards have remained upon the shoreline and have become transformed by tidal rhythms and storms, scoured and smoothed, sharp edges blunted and bright surfaces dulled, all now more rounded and pebble like.

What I found most striking was the high proportion of materials, which were clearly worked through the beach deposits.  Two hundred years of human refuse disposal from one dwelling had transformed the shoreline geo-morphological sediments of the cove.   The pieces of ceramic and glass forming the installation on the shoreline were only collected from the surface of the beach, below the surface are much greater numbers of sherds and shards.

Sherds of ceramic and shards of glass are relatively stable as materials, unlike the floating and volatile plastic containers, nurdles and microbeads, which are now permeating our water and littering our beaches, the chemicals from which are extending through the food chain with building levels of toxicity to all life forms.

We walk upon the sherds and shards of different shorelines now …