Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea

(2025 - onwards)

After an emergency flight back from Porto and time in hospital beds, I found myself returned to a childhood spare room, awaiting my fifth surgery. My body and psyche reorientated again through the ecology of endometriosis. For six weeks, I barely left that room. But a longing stirred: for light, for movement, for other oceans.

The sea called. Tentatively, I let my desire lead.

Salt Breath – Not Yet the Sea emerged from this suspended time. Made through the ecology of a body in pain—of endometriosis, longing, and care—it is a film about the act of navigating when mobility feels fractured, about finding a way to be in the world again through film. The camera became my breath, my way of thinking, my way of reaching outward.

Filmed mainly through rooms with a sea view, from a desire to be outside. Filmic breath became a way of reworlding. Entangled with fragments where I traced the sea’s edge. I found myself writing poetry full of desires for Irish waters and oceans beyond.

Shot across British coastal sites—Brighton, Margate, Hastings, Dungeness—the film inhabits the porous boundary between stillness and motion, illness and desire, land and memory. The sea is at times never quite arrived at, but it shimmers at the edges. At moments of motion, the sea is met. This is a film made through filmic breath, one that continues the elemental thread of my practice, yet carves a solitary path.

It began as a search for a room with a sea view. It became a “communal air.”

A friend said my voice

sounded better by the sea.

Navigating a body

in pain,

the sea has been

my companion,

A root in the suspended time,

between now and 

Surgery. 

Last night I returned

to the edit —

working with filmic breath,

recalling performances

with my mother

with Marian waters.

Tonight, my body won’t move

with the pain,

but it lies oriented toward the sea,

hearing it in my body,

and watching it

from my temporary bed.

And with this,

my body started dreaming again

of yet-to-come shores —

when that dreaming had paused,

grounded in the U.K. once more.

I found magic here again.

An unexpected return

to a home I had once left.