My previous visit to Two Tree Island a few weeks ago was at low tide, when all the mud was exposed. It was a damp, cool day and everything was grey and green. Revisiting the island today just after high tide, in glorious sunshine, it was all pale blue, grey and silver.
When I arrived the channel was full of water and I walked down the slipway to the water's edge and spent some time looking up and down the river. It is a long slipway and standing at the end, with the water lapping my boots, I could almost trick myself into a sense that I was standing in - or even on - the middle of the river. The water was mirroring the sky but was clear enough that at the same time I could see the bottom and the fish moving within it.
At the end of the slipway
After a few minutes I turned around and was amazed at how much had changed behind me while my back was turned to the island. The edge of the island was emerging from the water, but not all at once. The mud is shaped by the waves into ripples, a simulacrum of the surface of the water itself. What I could see were the crests of these mud-waves which, as they emerged (to my eye), took the form of sinuous hieroglyphs while the water twisted and snaked between them.
10:47am
11:03am
11:07am
11:08am
11:11am
11:14am
As I watched, the relationship between solid and fluid was changing so fast that I almost couldn't see it happening. Positive and negative shapes enlarging and shrinking and shifting before my eyes. I mean, if I focused on a particular point of course I could see the mud emerge as the water receded. But everything was so mobile, the water, the reflections, the light; and as I gazed at the surface, there was simply a general impression of everything changing and moving moment by moment.
I like these ambiguities.