/’A SEA OF CHALK’ is an installation inspired by the Cocking Lime Works chalk quarry in the South Downs, West Sussex. Emerging from this post-industrial landscape, the work reimagines conventional modes of thought through the lens of Édouard Glissant’s Archipelagic Thought, a philosophy that resists linear, continental ways of knowing in favour of multiplicity, connection, and fluidity.

Drawing on postcolonial and ecological perspectives, ‘A SEA OF CHALK’ engages the quarry as both a material and metaphorical archive, a landscape of extraction and transformation where histories of labour, geology, and experience layer over one another. The work approaches this site not as a singular narrative but as a constellation of interconnected fragments or ‘islands of thought’ that drift and join without dissolving their individuality.

The installation becomes a question into how we think and remember in the aftermath of colonial empires and industries. Through material, texture, and form, ‘A SEA OF CHALK’ invites viewers to inhabit a space of in between, where not everything is made transparent or knowable. By blending environmental, historical, and philosophical reference, the project explores an archipelagic imagination, one that acknowledges difference while acknowledging relation. The quarry, once a site of extraction, becomes a site of reflection: a landscape through which we might rethink how we connect, inherit, and imagine our shared worlds.