Music Mosaic

Song: Sea, Swallow Me by Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd

The song I have selected for my music mosaic project is a song from the 80's from a band called Cocteau Twins.  The song starts off with a broken chord from a piano synth and then the drums and other synths come in.  It has a ethereal quality to it; the feel and atmosphere is a kind of dream-like and seems to capture the way the water moves.  Listening to the song almost makes you feel as if you are floating in the middle of the ocean, or watching your body float away.  The reverb carries you away from whatever you are feeling or thinking, and all there is is the echo of the synth and Elizabeth Fraser's non-sensical vocals.  It is a very pretty song, yet it almost has a dark feeling to it.  If you are watching yourself float away in the middle of the ocean, there is a melancholy and depressive connotation.  The song is beautiful, but beauty is not happy.

I took inspiration from photographer Kyle Thompson, who often uses water in his photographs.  He has many photos that depict the act of drowning or being captured by water.  His photography is very pensive and dark, and I wanted to capture that essence in my photos to show the same kind of angst and drama that he captures.  

I decided that the best way to capture the dark beauty of the song would be to take clay and paint and create the ocean on something beautiful.  The clay and paint taint the fair skin of the subject, and shows the contrast the way the song does.  It is deceivingly pretty, but there is that extra something that sticks out and is memorable, that extra darkness.  The colors are blues and blacks to represent the deep hues of the ocean.  The texture of the clay is rough and broken and cracked, almost like tree bark, to show the harshness of the ocean.  It is growing over her, taking over her life slowly, just as water would your lungs.  The red lines then come in, representing blood, showing the harm that is slowly creeping into focus.  Together, the cracks and the colors and the texture come together to show a physical representation as to how the water is taking her under.