Beyond the rocky shelf was nothing but deep blue darkness.

Growing up on an island, you cannot help but have an affinity with the sea. Tasmania sits at the edge of the Southern Ocean surrounded by beauty, force, tranquillity, but also turbulence. The ebbs and flows, the cycle of life, the ever-present seas. It’s fierce yet fragile.

I remember swimming as a boy in the open waters off the coast and finding myself suddenly engulfed by a giant kelp forest. The enormous seaweed entangled my limbs and closed in around me, and for a moment there was panic for all I could see was kelp. But then it opened up, and I was looking into an underwater canyon brimming with sea life. The scale of it was incredible. Beyond the rocky shelf was nothing but deep-blue darkness. Behind me, the kelp forest. In front of me, a thriving aquatic ecosystem entirely unfazed by my being there. That revelation has stayed with me as a reminder of the immense beauty and diversity that exists just below the surface, another world only a breath away.

As a designer, I have spent my working life shaping materials. I study how they behave, where they yield and where they resist, what they are willing to become. In the studio, I lead the conversation. But the ocean does not work that way. You cannot grip the current. You cannot shape the sea. When you enter the water, that authority dissolves, and what replaces it is something closer to wonder. The ocean is the original creator, and its timescale dwarfs anything the human hand has known.

This is what the ocean gives back, if we are open to it: a recalibration of what it means to exist, and a humility before forces far greater than our own. You cannot help but be in awe of the magnitude of it all, from the fluid fringes of our coastlines to the vast open oceans that connect us all.