The sail used in this work was part of a working boat before the material came to me, driven through open water, stretched, loaded and repaired over years. This history is visible if you look closely at the surface. I began working with these types of materials because of my own geographic history: growing up between the US, Brazil, and having since immigrated to the UK. The Atlantic has always been the space in between.

I think about the ocean as a "hyperobject" in the Timothy Morton sense: something so vast and so distributed across time and space that one can never perceive the whole of it. I am always at one edge, experiencing it locally in the marks it leaves on a sail over years, but unable to stand outside it and see it in its entirety. This is part of why it works as a methodology instead of a subject: I can never depict a hyperobject and so I must work from inside it.

Working from a surface already bearing marks of its own past meant that I was engaging with staining, texture, and structural seams. These are marks of survival. The figures I painted onto the sail had to negotiate that history to find their own position within it. This is the subject I keep returning to: bodies finding their place within conditions not built around them, and the choices made when outside conditions make those choices necessary or desired, even when they carry a cost.

The word "across" names distance between two things, neither of which can resolve the space between them. The impossible thing being looked across is the ocean, the horizon, and love. "Still looking" implies a maintained effort across that distance. There is text written faintly in pencil on the back of the sail: we stood and claimed the moon. It is a gesture toward something shared across an impossible distance, a claiming of what cannot be possessed. Legible, but only if you look closely.

A mooring cleat and rope tether the work to its space, enacting their true function: to keep things from drifting away. The labour of holding a position, of still looking, of forever reaching across impossible distances, is what I want to make visible.

An installation of three human-scale figures made from salvaged sailcloth, fishing nets, handmade rope, and salt-treated and indigo-dyed cotton and silk, held together and upright by steel armatures. The structural armatures are made visible as part of the work. A mooring cleat and rope support one figure, keeping it from falling. The postures range from standing upright, to leaning and crawling, and the surfaces carry evidence of material processes: degraded fibres, accumulation marks, and salt erosion and crust.

The figures occupy the space as bodies. Their exposed armatures reveal the effort required of maintaining their positions, and they sink into their postures over time. The work asks what recalibration, adjustment, translation and absorbing of friction happens for stability to remain possible. These figures are not heroic or triumphant. They are doing what must be done to remain standing, by what means they have available.

The decision to expose rather than conceal the support structure came partly from research into museum conservation mounts, where objects from one context are held upright in another by infrastructure that is usually invisible. These figures invert that logic.

The research running alongside this work draws on Silvia Federici's analysis of reproductive labour, Lauren Berlant's writing on the psychological cost of attachment to capitalist systems, and Sara Ahmed's work around the social cost of naming invisible labour. These frameworks inform both the work and an accompanying critical essay which develops the argument under the framing of the body as infrastructure.

The title came from how I would naturally describe the work out loud. Plain speech as a form of resistance to the institutional language the essay itself describes.