I chose to respond in song to this wonderful photograph, The shell by Olive Cotton. I often feel, I don't even know if this is true, but I often feel that Olive Cotton's work is a little bit in the shadow of her contemporaries, like Max Dupain–that sort of period. But I think she was really extraordinary in the sort of experiments that she was doing, particularly in that still life setting, and particularly with the ways that she used artificial light to create this magic.
The photograph is called 'The shell', and it's a seashell and it's lit from inside with a light bulb. So it has this kind of incredible, luminous quality and with the ways that photographs have been developed differently over the years, there's something about seeing it in person that you can't quite see it on the internet. It's hard to look at it on a screen, but when you see how luminous it is in real life–that shine–that was what I wanted to write about.
The whole thing about seashells when you hold them up to your ear that you hear the ocean–which obviously you don't–but it's such a lovely thought. So I wrote about how it's this object you can put in your hand and you might be skeptical, but if you hold it up to your ear, it's like the whole world is in there. This incredible thing that occurs in nature, but then Olive Cotton takes it and amplifies it with technology.
So I found that really interesting, and that's how I approached writing this text for The Shell.
