From a young age, I have carried a persistent feeling that when you enter the sea, when you slip beneath the surface and let the world above dissolve, you are in some quiet way returning to the womb.

Not a memory exactly, we do not possess that. But something deeper, more instinctive. A kind of muscle memory of first consciousness. We know that in the womb there is sound, light, movement: rhythms that shape us before we ever understand them. And so when I descend, especially at night, it feels less like entering somewhere new, and more like arriving somewhere ancient and familiar. A sense of déjà vu in the body. A return to origin.

That predisposition has always made me feel part of something much larger. The sensation is not unlike standing beneath a night sky; aware in a fleeting but profound way that you are embedded within a system that has existed for billions of years. The sea carries that same weight of time, that same quiet vastness. It humbles you, but it also invites you in.

My work has always been an attempt to draw others into that space. Not just to observe it, but to feel it – to experience some semblance of those moments that have shaped me. The human figure plays a central role in this. Encountering a familiar form submerged, transformed and slowly inhabited by life creates a tension, something recognisable placed within an unfamiliar world. Over time, that figure becomes part of the environment, no longer separate from it. I hope that in witnessing this, people begin to sense their own place within a wider, living system.

I have long believed that we understand the world not only through facts, but through stories, through lived experience, through narratives passed between generations. Science gives us the framework to comprehend the complexity of our environment, but it is emotion that shapes how we respond to it. Art exists somewhere between those two realms. It translates the abstract into something felt, something personal.

In a time when we are increasingly distanced from the natural world, when the ocean in particular is under immense strain, I see art as a bridge back. Not as an answer, but as an invitation. A way to reconnect and reawaken a sense of care.

And perhaps most importantly, a way to hold onto hope. Not a naïve optimism, but a grounded sense of possibility. To create something that not only reflects the world, but contributes to it. To build structures that foster life is to offer proof that change is still within reach. That we are not powerless.

Over two decades working underwater, I have witnessed extremes. Moments of real loss, and moments of extraordinary beauty. The sea has taught me when to let go, and when to hold on tightly. And through it all, it has reinforced a simple truth: that we are not separate from this world, we are part of it

This is how this short essay appears in the special Oceanographic publication, The Innerview