Over many years of walking on Killiney beach, I began collecting pieces of driftwood whose shapes suggested half-formed human figures. I imagined each fragment as the final remnant of someone lost at sea: a sailor clinging to the last physical object connecting him to the world of the living, carried endlessly by tide and weather in the hope of returning to land.

As more pieces were gathered, stories and poems began to emerge around them. Each sailor carried fading memories: fragments of childhood, love affairs, harbours, superstitions, storms. The driftwood became both body and reliquary, preserving traces of lives already disappearing.

The project gradually expanded into an interconnected body of work comprising sculpture, poetry, watercolour paintings, portrait prints, music, and the fictional diary of a monument-maker devoted to preserving the memory of the drowned. Reliquary pillars and mourning figures draw on the language of medieval devotional objects: shrines created to house sacred fragments and protect them from oblivion.

Lost Sailors is an imagined archive of the forgotten dead, and of the human need to memorialise what cannot be recovered.

Music by Neil Hannon & Cathy Davey