Sara Baume & Marion Coutts

In 2021, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to contact the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged lane, surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common – a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, and an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic. Sara fell under the spell of Mollie’s paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually began to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be afforded by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. What she had not anticipated, however, was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself wrestling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain, and the power of art. 

In Marion Coutts’ What did the Deep Sea Say?, a mother and her young son cross the Atlantic in the aftermath of catastrophic loss and they take refuge in a wooden house on a remote strip of land. Viewed from the shore, where land meets sea, the horizon is a line that holds their attention and draws them in. Camera in hand, she charts their progress and starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family. Writing with precision and clarity, Marion combines the real with the fictional, thinking through art, poetry, geology, maps and Minecraft to present a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, the visible and the invisible and the fragility and strangeness of the ocean and its borders.