Between Wind & Water is a deeply personal meditation on grief, not so much about my father himself, but about the experience of losing him. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida similarly explores loss. While rooted in the death of his mother, it is equally concerned with the subjectivity of photography. Grief, like photography, is profoundly personal, shaped as much by the viewer as by the author.

My memories of time spent at sea with my parents, before I was required to attend school, are bound to this sense of subjectivity. Traveling aboard vast cargo ships with Irish Shipping was an uncommon experience, one that belongs solely to my childhood. Returning to the west coast of Ireland, I sought out these ships and photographed the absence of life within their immense engine rooms. I focused on corners and details, silent and hulking forms, in which I searched for a sense of peace.

The postcards my father sent during the periods when we could not join him at sea eerily mirror my emotions. He was always present, yet never in a physical form. Within the obscurity of grief, moments of stillness and clarity emerge. It is in these moments that I feel closest to him. The finality of loss casts darker tones over life. Rather than the simple appreciation of beauty, the sublime has come to hold greater meaning for me. It expresses a contrast of aesthetic qualities in which beauty is surface, while the sublime is its brooding understructure, capable of finding resonance even in the seemingly ugly.

Precious memories are embedded within these metal engines. We return to places of the past in search of meaning, attempting to awaken memory so as not to forget. Some of my earliest and most cherished memories are of time spent with my father aboard cargo ships, traveling the world. The vast engine rooms became a welcome assault on my numbed senses. I felt enveloped by his presence. These memories are both separate from and created by the self, a dualism we grapple with throughout life, and nowhere more intensely than in grief.

Though these spaces appear haunted, ghosts in the machine, my father’s physical absence is replaced by vivid memories within these quiet, still images. They no longer possess a fixed place in reality. They belong to me now, not to him. These sites function as places of pilgrimage, tombs of noise that soften my loss. They are not merely machines, but spaces that reawaken my world.

Paired with the postcards, the work spans both my childhood absence from my father and my present day reconstruction of memory. When I could no longer be at sea, these postcards became his presence at home. Now, these photographs serve as my own postcards, messages sent across time, carrying memory, loss, and love.