The beach as a space of defamiliarisation

Regardless of whether 3 or 100m deep; sandy or stony; wild or manicured; beside a noisy road or remote, the beach conjures up an imaginary space which as a liminal encounter of nature and culture orients our vision in and view of the world. Furthermore, how and where we position ourselves in and along the no-man’s-land strip reflects degrees of our immersion in the natural and cultural, identifying questions of why the beach has a peculiar place in our imaginations and visuality. We look out from the beach onto a broader, open vacant space; a space wherein nature is realized as the distant, the untameable the ineffable. Horizon on the one hand, and vertical height, on the other, represent the volume of space at the beach in tension with the grains of sand structuring its overall form. Within these differential scales and proportions, the rhythmic flood and ebb of water, the clearly visible times of day and periods of season extend the dimension of time into a spatial form.  Taking Victor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarisation as our point of departure, we explore how these spatial and temporal aspects of the beach can be metaphorically understood as paralleling the condition of art. For this state of knowing nothing, characterized by defamiliarisation, is the initial vessel in which new thoughts and images are free to develop.