Across the Universe

Lisa Wilkerson’s photos belong to a specific place, Arroyo Grande, California, and its Pacific skies and seas, in all their amazing explosive colours - orange, purple, raspberry, turquoise, scarlet, pink, providing her with extravagant natural resources that are both local and universal, in that sea and sky address the world through their universal energies. Although I’ve spent all my adult life in London, I come from a granite chip, 12 X10 miles, 30 minutes flight time from Gatwick to Jersey Channel Islands, an offshore financial sector, that originally inspired the imaginative uptake of my early poetry, and continues to colour it when I focus imaginatively on its green and blue tides and offshore independence. I suspect Lisa has similarly ambivalent feelings about her home at Arroyo Grande, an isolated rural precinct, in which the dominants are community, the vivacity of nature, and the big climb in and climb out of the predominantly blue Pacific. And there’s a tidal interzone, the space between rise and fall, in which she searches Morro Bay for its stranded rock pool creatures, some of which appear as marine aliens in these photos. I’m the empathetic spectator to Lisa’s wonderful creations - the poet looking in through a window at what’s brought together here as a documentation of her intensely personal celebration of beauty as she finds it, quite literally a step away.