Before hooves grow

Produced during the Arnis Art Residency in Arnis, Germany, Island Shoals responds to the particular geography of Germany’s smallest city, situated on a narrow peninsula extending into the Schlei inlet. Formerly an island, Arnis was connected to the mainland in the 18th century, leaving a landscape where the distinction between island and mainland remains geographically and historically present.

Drawing on nautical charts and navigation markers, the work takes the form of an abstracted shoal buoy — a device normally used to signal shallow waters, submerged obstacles and navigational hazards. Positioned on the isthmus that now connects Arnis to the mainland, the marker offers neither a clear warning nor a route towards safe water. Instead, Island Shoals uses this ambiguous geography to consider the island as both refuge and enclosure: a place defined as much by the possibility of retreat as by separation from what lies beyond it.