I Am the Sea

The project relates the author’s special connections to the sea and swimming. Since childhood, the sea has been a symbolic environment for the author, from which she draws psychological certainty and support. Swimming, physically overcoming the expanse of the sea, becomes a metaphor for the path to oneself, an accessible way of reassembling one’s personality, and an effective means to look into one’s own depth.

Endowed with high symbolic meaning, the images of the sea act in the same space as the artist’s dreams and childhood memories. This habitable, tamed space of the irrational is not hostile to her — it collaborates. And every real journey to the sea, the opportunity to enter its waters and swim far from the shore allows her once more to be in close proximity with herself and her creative beginnings.

In an attempt to understand how and why the physical dimension of the sea, when engaged with, transforms into a metaphysical one, the author turns to interpretations of the element in Jung’s philosophy and the mythology of Ancient Greeks. The project visualizes the Jungian understanding of the sea as a space of the irrational and unconscious, with the sea god Proteus becoming the personification of the untamed forces of the subconscious and one of the central characters of the artist’s dreams.