Masters Research

  Having looked at the impact of the sea level rise I wanted to see how much insurance for flooding would cost someone, I checked GoCompares website and there they listed this information which gave an estimate based on distance from water how much flooding insurance would cost a homeowner. I would have thought that proximity and price would have changed a lot when further away from the water however it seems to stay pretty close to that £193 figure, along with this flooding insurance isn't as expensive as I thought it was however it's still something that anyone living near a body of water will have to consider as it is now a real possibility that flooding will become less and less rare. Looking at countrywide cost estimates for the damage flooding can cause is very scary, seeing that in 2015/16 flooding caused £1.6 billion worth of damage is crazy and that between November and March flooding caused around £333 million worth of damage just makes me even more scared for the imp...

 When thinking about our connection to the sea I started to think about the very real possibility of sea-level rise due to climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps, this is where I found this website where you can see the extent of sea-level rise on a map in your area. I found this map called surging seas which aims to detail what rising seas will llook like on our maps, I decided to look at Portsmouth not only because it is where I currently am but also because I would assume it would be one of the hardest hit areas when it comes to sea level rising.  Simply moving the sea level to 1 foot above current levels the sea rushes into portsmouth, pretty much filling up the common and getting into parts of southsea closes to the sea. Along with this it also reaches into Old Portsmouth and Milton Common, its so strange thinking that these areas would be underwater so quickly after such a small sea level change however this is becoming a very real and scary prospect that w...

  I think it will be good to look more at the relationship people have with the sea and how it changes their way of life, I found this book about folktales in England. Because England is an island nation I want to see if I can find any folktales in it that may be about the sea and give me a better understanding of the relationship with it in the past. Within the book, I only really found two examples of folktales that were about the sea which was pretty annoying but anyway. The first one I found was called The Sea Morgan and The Conger Eels where a mysterious creature called a "sea morgan" would sing and draw people out into the mudflats once the tide had gone out. Once out there the victims would be sucked down into the mud and eaten by eels, the creature is killed by a deaf boy who goes out on the mud in a sled to kill the "sea morgan". This story reminded me a lot of the sirens and mermaids I had been reading about however a Sea Morgan was never mentioned. Doing ...

 When I think about pirate and the sea there are two things and representations that instantly come to mind, the first being Disney's representation of the "swash buckling" pirate in the film franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. To me this representation is an interesting representation as it melds real world aspects, the British empire and East India company attempting to rid the seas of pirates. And other worldly aspects that of the black pearl and Davey Jones locker to name a few. The next representation that I connect to that of Pirates is the book Jamaica Inn written by Daphne Du Maurier, which is a story about Cornish smugglers and the very real history of smugglers and wreckers that existed along the Cornish coast. Wrecking was the practice of falsely steering ships towards rocks to purposely wreck and run aground, these ships would then be looted by the wreckers and smuggled in land where it would be sold. I think it would be worth looking into both these types of ...

Looking at these odd sea creatures dotted along the sea on the map sparked my interest in looking further into the sea creatures and exploring if there is a connection between love and fear of the sea if those feelings are manifested in the myths surrounding these massive bodies of water. I found this book by Jon Hackett and Sean Harrington that looks at the connection between sea creatures we have created and the cultural impact that they have had on our collective psyche, thinking about some now the obvious choice for an impactful sea myth is that of mermaids. Because they are seen as beautiful creatures that lure you in, this seems like a clear connection to the sea itself. Sailors and people alike see the sea as this beautiful place to be explored and enjoyed however it lures you in with this promise only to be much darker and scary than before. There was one chapter of this book that instantly drew my attention, it was about Thalassophobia. I had never heard of this sort of phobia...

  I decided to go back to the map library to search for some more maps that either piqued my interest or had these odd sea creatures on them. What I found were these beautifully decorated and adorned maps, where the focus wasn't really on the map itself but rather the illustrations around the maps. Like with this one where they have these intriguing illustrations of people and animals and what seems to be angels in the skies above. I started to think about why all these maps I was looking at had these illustrations around them, maybe it was some kind of storytelling to do with something in the bible or other religious text or it could be simply to make the map more interesting as I found before mostly these sort of maps were used for decoration rather than actual navigation so is this what the illustrations are for. I love looking at all these sea creatures that are drawn onto the sea they are so interesting and other worldly that I wonder if they came from real creatures of the se...

 I wanted to look at early maps of the sea and landmasses around the sea to see how early map makers interpreted the sea, I have an idea in my head that there are illustrations of monsters (here be monsters) in areas of the sea representing places they haven't mapped or explored yet. Thinking about this it might be interesting to explore this idea, thinking about myths that grew around the sea to explain the disappearance of ships and the legends that appeared with pirates that we now see on film like with "Pirates of the Caribbean". To get the maps I wanted I decided to visit the Map Library, there I asked the librarian for maps on coastal areas and the sea, thankfully he had loads of examples that I could look through along with a link to a website I could use to see even more maps. Looking at these was fascinating, the first one he showed me was dated 1610 and is full of interesting oddities that are used within the map. Like this where the map maker includes sea creat...

  We then took the posters to a group session where I got feedback from my tutor and the rest of the class, this was a really useful session as it helped me to understand where I need to go and potential ways in which I could connect each project idea. At the start when I laid out all three posters people in the class were asked to pick which one was their least favourite, like me they picked the left poster "sea & plastics" to most of the class they just found this one the most boring and I would agree with this. While the subject matter of pollution and rubbish in the sea is very important I feel this subject has been done to death and adding my voice on top of the others would not make my project interesting, even if I had a different way of approaching the subject matter. Out of the two remaining posters, the class and the tutor were more interested and connected better with the "calming waves" poster. One of the reasons was because they liked the look of th...

  Once I had decided on the possible subjects I could do for my Masters, we needed to create a set of three posters to describe the possible areas we could go in. Because I had one overarching area that cemented the possible areas, that being the sea, I decided that for each of the posters the background or main colour used should be a blue for the sea. I didn't just want to have the backgrounds be just one blue colour, instead I wanted to create a gradient of blues and greens as these would represent the sea better. Along with this because I wanted to create these posters by hand, using the computer very little, I decided to make the background using a technique where you take tissue paper and wet it on the paper with a sponge then the ink will seep through onto the paper and create this really interesting and sea like texture that works really well for what I wanted it for. As you can see the water and tissue paper technique creates this really interesting and water like texture ...