Migration is the thread running through some of my work, and not in a single sense. The same word describes a person crossing a border, a starling folding into a murmuration, a thought drifting from the task at hand, a database moving to new storage, or a boulder dropped by glacial movement long ago. Tracing the word across these registers, human, animal, idea, data, geological, I kept finding versions of the same question: what makes a thing leave, and what decides whether it can?
That question really seems to be about motivation and risk. Every migration is a bet that movement is worth more than staying put, refuge over danger, opportunity over stagnation, a wandering mind over a fixed task. But that bet isn’t distributed evenly. Some movement is chosen, travel, expansion, conquest. Some is forced, war, weather, collapsing livelihoods. Choice, I keep finding, is for the privileged. For everyone and everything else, migration is survival strategy first and freedom second, if at all.
What keeps this from staying abstract is the evidence migration leaves behind. Memory sits in it: a repeated route becomes instinct, a migration pattern becomes an inherited map, a displacement becomes a story passed down. Adjustment and integration follow, the mapping of a new place onto the self, or the self onto a new place. Even geology holds this record. The Wallace Line marks where deep water once stopped animals from crossing between islands, and that ancient boundary still shows in the species living on either side today. The geological past is still writing the biological present.
So, this theme isn’t about migration as an event. It’s about migration as behaviour, the patterns, drivers, and residues of movement, whether it belongs to a person, a flock, a thought, or sediment shaped over geological time. What interests me most is that shift in scale, from one migrant’s choice to a murmuration’s collective shape to a rock formation moved by changing nature, and finding the same logic of risk, adjustment, and memory at every level.
See artworks in following series:
- Rough Edge Cartography
- Migrating Boulders
- Erratics