malcolm tait, contemporary artist.                         sketchbook for not waving but drowning

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This sketchbook was completed in 2000, it is marks a very personal episode in my life, I worked as a volunteer coastguard for seven years and during that period someone I knew committed suicide, it was a sad episode but at the time it had little affected on me. However two years later as part of a coastguard team I was part of a search team looking for a man who had threatened suicide by entering the sea of the East Coast. Sadly he did and I was one of two coastguards who witnessed the transfer of the body in a body bag from the lifeboat to the coroners vehicle. I have no idea what the trigger was but it left within me many unhappy feeling about the first suicide and it took me two years to come to terms with those feelings. The times logged on the pages below are relevant times in the search we made during the second suicide. I never found any answers to resolve my feeing of unhappiness about the first event, perhaps it was the process of examining the event or simply the passage of time that resolved them. The following with the help of Stevie Smith's poem records a very personal journey.

The finished work of nine computer generated images.

Not Waving but Drowning.

To view pages in greater detail click on the thumbnails, to return to sketchbooks  page Click Here         

copyright Malcolm J. Tait January 2009