White Horses is a film and travelling sculptural work developed through a winter journey around the English coast. Presented using 16mm projection inside a specially designed black tent, it brings together encounters with people whose lives are closely connected to the sea.

The work formed the central touring component of Sea Like a Mirror, a national programme led by Cement Fields, with its wider touring concept shaped in dialogue with Morison. Opening in Whitstable in May 2025, it travelled to Cromer, Barrow-in-Furness, Weston-super-Mare, Cleethorpes and Gravesend, returning to the places and communities involved in its making.

The two titles draw on the language of the Beaufort scale. A sea like a mirror offers calm and reflection; white horses signal the gathering force of the weather. For Morison, the movement towards a wholly white sea suggested a passage from recognition into uncertainty, from seeing ourselves clearly to losing that image altogether.

The original proposal brought together the survey, the show and the tour. Its references included Peter Greenaway’s The Sea in Their Blood and the tradition of idiosyncratic journeys around Britain. It also continued approaches developed within Peak and Morison’s earlier work, from the photographic observations of Starmaker to the travelling puppet theatre Mr Clevver. Travel provided a method of encounter; the resulting work offered those encounters back in an altered form.

Morison’s process was to spend time with people and join in what they did. Lifeboat stations opened onto wider coastal worlds of domestic life, work, recreation and rescue. Filming grew through participation, hospitality and unexpected invitations.

During the first research visit to Whitstable, Ollie, an RNLI volunteer, described living with the possibility of being called out at any moment. Morison later filmed Ollie and Ruth, an RNLI couple, preparing for bed. These domestic rituals brought preparedness into focus: the quiet arrangements through which someone remains ready to act on behalf of another. Readiness became a form of care, sustained long before an emergency makes it visible.

Working with an analogue camera continued Morison’s longstanding use of medium-format photography to slow attention and become more closely involved with a subject. Film also introduced distance, making contemporary places appear strangely displaced in time. Chris Hope’s original score accompanied the journey, bringing music, projected light and the physical passage of film together within a shared, durational experience.

The tent drew upon Morison’s childhood fascination with the arrival of the circus. It was conceived as a compelling and slightly unsettling visitor, appearing in a familiar place, gathering an audience and then departing. This outsider’s position also shaped the film: a deliberately personal and incomplete account, attentive to what remained beyond the artist’s understanding. The mirror of Sea Like a Mirror could resemble a fairground mirror, revealing something through distortion as much as through faithful reflection.

Touring completed the movement begun by the research. Audiences encountered familiar places alongside lives and landscapes elsewhere, finding themselves within a larger, unfamiliar whole. At each destination, independently authored commissions by local artists introduced further perspectives through sound, performance, making and conversation. The film entered a different dialogue at every stop, with the tent providing a temporary place in which these encounters could gather.

Cement Fields director Jon Davis described the ambition as:

“a communal and architectural intervention … enabling us to see our surroundings afresh and consider the civic institutions and social ties that bind us together.”

       

“When I began this wintertime survey of the coast, I was looking for storms, and people who face that storm, people who have found a place in the service of the sea. I have met fishermen of lobsters and crab, farmers of oysters, I have seen where we build our nation’s nuclear submarines, and understood the changing economies of these coastal towns, I have been out to wind farms and watched blade technicians at work, I have darted between huge tankers with a sixth-generation skipper on his tug, and I have swam with those that swim and been saved by those that save.

“Yes I have found waves, sometimes there have been storms, but more than that I think I have found a changing but thriving coast populated by people with a sparkle in their eyes, doing remarkable things with an understated competence, and a lightness and joy. It’s this everyday preparedness, the ability to perform in extreme conditions, that I think I am looking for, and that perhaps the final work may illustrate. This is not a comprehensive survey, just an impression, the film an evocation of the spirit of these places and people.”

Ivan Morison, 2025

Photographers’ credits       


Sam Wainwright / Tom Carter / Ivan Morison