Pollock’s Pool: When Warships Vanish into Abstraction
Pollock’s Pool
Pollock’s Pool (150 x 100 cm) emerged during the creation of the Art of Navy project. At the outset, I faced a challenge: how could I capture reflections from the surface of the water when the dark grey hulls of the warships seemed to dissolve into the equally dark blue of the harbour? I was unsure if there was even an image to be found.
It was in this search that the unexpected appeared. While drifting with my camera around Royal Australian Navy vessels of all kinds, I was suddenly drawn to turbulence breaking across the surface. The movement caught the light in surprising ways, transforming absence into presence. Where I expected nothing, lines, splashes, and swirls began to reveal themselves. I hesitantly pressed the shutter.
Later, when I looked at the image, the recognition was immediate: it was Pollock. The turbulence echoed the rhythm and spontaneity of his drip technique — paint flung, dripped, and splattered across canvas in a way that was at once chaotic and deeply ordered. Yet here, there was no brush, no hand, no paint. It was simply water, reflecting sky and light, composing its own abstract painting.
Pollock once said, “I am nature.” That idea resonates powerfully here. For me, abstraction isn’t something imposed — it’s something revealed. Just as Pollock trusted chance, gravity, and gesture to uncover subconscious form, I find that the surface of the sea reveals its own abstractions. In photographing it, I am not creating but recognising — seeing what is already there.
In this work, the sea becomes both medium and message. The medium is the surface of the water itself — constantly shifting, reflecting, and refracting — while the message is the truth it reveals about abstraction and self. What we see is not only turbulence on water, but a mirror of how nature itself paints: spontaneously, unpredictably, and yet with a rhythm that feels inevitable.
It leaves me asking — and perhaps it asks you too: where does the boundary lie between what nature creates and what we recognise as art? And then, in thinking of Pollock, another question arises: was he revealing chaos, or uncovering the very patterns that nature had always painted for us?
