I make sea pictures, but I don't mean that they're necessarily pictures of the sea; they are pictures in the sea. This is important because I want the sea to have more than an influence on the work and pictures, more than just the content of the images. I want the sea to be the one that makes the pictures and that I only make the vessels that enable the sea to make pictures. In this way, I hope to give the sea eyes.

'"Why should it swallow all those ships if they are its eyes?'
Dood looks almost a little out of patience when he turns toward Bartleboom and says,
"But you,… Don't you ever close your eyes?"
Christ. He has an answer for everything, this boy.'

Baricco, Alessandro, Ocean Sea, Penguin Books Ltd, 2000 pp. 91-92

Dood's idea seems to give my pinhole vessels reason and integrity, almost an objective. And I do like to imagine that the sea sees.

The process of making cameras watertight, or at least vaguely seaworthy, I find very enjoyable and rewarding. It's my speciality. There are no criteria or any people to judge the effectiveness of my cameras because there is no perfect image: the process is an experiment and any mark is like receiving a transmission from space, in a foreign language. It's so dependent on so many variables such as the sun, wind, waves, tide and currents.

The pinhole vessels took a long time to test and develop. The first time I took them into the water, I also took a waterproof viewfinder camera. These conventional images became a body of work, which developed in parallel to the pinhole project and became a vital component. These are my large colour images from negatives made at sea. They are pictures in the sea. The conditions that can be seen in the images are recounted in my language. I travelled throughout 2004, 2005 and 2006 to find a collection of diverse conditions and remove them from their places.

The seas are only seas, and provide few clues about their whereabouts and their situation, and really could be anywhere. For this reason I used my diary entries to provoke personal memories and bring geographical information and history to the images.

My intention is for visitors to appreciate the beauty of the colour images, and in this, find the titles, locations and dates to give proportion and place to otherwise obscure and slightly alien images. The titles and corresponding log entries provide solid facts to which one can relate.

I mentioned that the process of making the cameras is important, as is the floating of the cameras. Different cameras create different kinds of images. For example, the first pinholes were based on the idea of the lobster pot marker buoy. The camera was attached to the top of the buoy, where the flag would go, kept up but the counterweight underneath the surface. In this way the camera was a buoy and was anchored to the seabed. It made an image marked by the brightness of the sun but designed by the surface of the sea.
I developed this idea and started to wonder what a boat would see should it become a pinhole camera. As the hull of a boat determines its movements in the water, the movements would be completely different from those of a buoy.

In July 2005 I started to refurbish and transform a derelict family heirloom, a mirror dinghy called GFTFD into a pinhole camera. This September I put my Granddad's boat/pinhole camera into the water and it made an image. It is my intention to develop this idea in Denmark with new vessels and new images.

It should be apparent that my work exists largely in the process and construction of the apparatus, working with re-appropriated materials to create primitive devices. These are strong aspects of the work and should be viewed as such. Often, the image made inside the vessel is incidental to the making and floating of the vessel itself.