"Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries - stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region". (H. Melville)
2020 - ongoing
The project was born out of an enquiry into the personal perpetual anxiety and the way out of it, sometime back in December 2020, stuck on a very strange island, surrounded by the Atlantic.
This is the first chapter of this project, which employs the working scientific concept of "Blue Mind" devised by Dr Wallace J Nichols. It investigates our transformative connection to water and provides the scientific toolkit to our tacit knowledge: very human, millennia-old intuitions, all of which tend to instinctively drive us to spend time in, near, on or under water; in turn making us more balanced and more well-rounded human beings. This mildly meditative state serves as a remedy to what is known as “red mind” - the anxious, over-connected and over-stimulated state that defines the new normal of modern life.
It is reassuring to know these places of serenity and re-creation exist. Places where we can replenish a certain physical, emotional and psychological deficit and round up the simple fractions. Even if we are not there, just looking at a picture depicting a watery landscape set our minds adrift. The knowledge and the possibility of a better being is soothing; the sheer reassurance in knowing these places exist.
Until they don't...
This work has been supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
