i want to know the ocean

I designed and authored I Want To Know The Ocean from start to finish—every photograph, artwork, word, and piece of research is my own.

The ocean is vast, ancient, and alive. Body, memory, movement, and mystery. She is never still, never singular, never fully knowable. Through this book, and through the ritual it documents, I hope to meet Her.

To sit with Her not as backdrop, but as presence. To go to Her with intention.

To study Her through ritual, through mapping, through the senses. To let waves become a form of therapy, meditation, and prayer.

To observe the shoreline under constraint, to listen more than I speak, and to allow that practice to soften the burden of the self.

Sometimes the self is what makes connection hardest. We become so overfilled with our own thoughts, fears, and wants that we cannot relate to anything beyond them. The ocean offers another possibility: dilution. Not disappearance, but release. A chance to loosen the boundaries of the self enough to connect, and in that connection, perhaps remember oneself more fully.

This is a book about trying to know the ocean, but it is also a book about trying to know myself through Her. If part of me is ocean, then perhaps this study is not only an act of observation, but of return.

Book + visual identity, 2026