I have sought water all my life. Growing up, I was never more than a few miles from the ocean. As a child in Bolinas, California, I walked down to Agate Beach almost every afternoon, or on weekends, alone or with my father. The cliffs are constantly eroding there, a tinkling sound like broken glass as little pebbles fall down in countless streams. Tide pools with chiton and anemone swaying in the salt. I would beg to be allowed to bring back long strands of kelp, or crab shells, only to find them later, forgotten and reeking in the trunk.

The water is a compass. It has led me over and over to people and places I have been fed by. Aotearoa, the Portuguese coast, the Bay Area; here is some favourite work by artists also mesmerized by the sea.

The work of Bas Jan Ader danced around capturing the fleeting, sometimes dark and sometimes humorous moments of our mortal bodies moving through the air, the water, small actions. The first film of his I saw was Fall I. Funny and sad at once, it is a moment uncomfortably slowed and repeated of a body falling off a roof. It feels comic and nihilistic at once. When I worked at a gallery in Los Angeles that represented (somewhat controversially) his work, I became fascinated by his 1975 final piece, his own mysterious disappearance. He set sail from Massachusetts aged 33 on the small boat Ocean Wave, intending to cross the Atlantic. However accomplished a sailor he was, from my own sailing experiences, the thought of crossing that body of water on a 13 foot boat brings shivers. Did he intend to survive? Unknown. Although the boat was later found, alone, off the coast of Ireland, Bas Jan Ader’s body never was.

Delia Derbyshire’s The Dreams, made with Barry Bermange, is one of my favourite collections of music. One can listen to it over and over; hypnotic. Recordings of people speaking about their dreams are obsessively cut and collaged by Delia against some of her darkest ambient tape work. Her use of repetition is haunting, a relationship to tape verging on occult ritual, in these works especially. I love how completely she obsesses while simultaneously giving room for the medium to decide itself. Admiring the ocean sometimes necessitates, I think, a reverence for its chaos and power. Sailing for example requires a deep respect for how easily the water could kill you. One of my favourite sections of The Dreams, a track called “Sea”, captures this combined sense of magnetism and deep terror: “I disappeared under the sea, and I would surface again, and I would start to drown again, and I would surface again, come up again, then I would go down into the water and… and I had this sensation that I was going to drown. And it was frightening and suffocating. My clothes were dragging me back…”.

My friend Jordan gave me a copy of Desert, Sea And Stars, a book by Vija Celmins. I remember the crisp blue cover and the surprise of her work inside. Gentle and meticulous drawings of the ocean, of stars. Her drawings are dreamlike and embody a rare confluence of straightforward talent and unaffected depth, resonance; effortless and breathtaking at once. Paradoxically minimal and full of incredible detail.

Paul Clipson loved the water. His work often documented the myriad of captivating ways that light reflects upon its surface. When I was first getting to know him many years ago, I still made my own videos for performance, and they often included nighttime reflections of light on water. Seeing his studies of the same subject was one of the ways that we first connected. This has been copied now a million times, which I think he would see, in his gentle way, as a compliment.

One film in particular, 2013’s BRIGHT MIRROR, captures a moment with the sea. The fevered dance of a figure (his oft muse, daughter Anya) twirling and dancing is transformed by the touch of waves into a shadow spirit. Silhouette replaces the body as the carrier of energy. It is magnetic and haunting, the piece of his I think of most. I remember Paul telling me he became disoriented while filming this one. Lena, his partner, remembers being nearby, as she almost always was when Paul filmed, on this day helping keep everyone safe from the ocean so that they could relax and go with where the film and moment were leading. “It was amazing. I remember how we were filming it in front of the Golden Gate Bridge on a tiny beach. The tide was ferocious and coming in. Paul was on the slippery rock high up directing Anya and filming. The water was cold; it was May.”

Liz Harris aka Grouper is The Wire 451’s cover feature by Dave Segal. Subscribers can also read Nick Richardson’s 2011 piece about Grouper in The Wire 334 in our online archive.