"Sea.. six... four...three...Emma wins, Emma's go", so goes the artist's commentary on her game of dice with the sea. We never see her, we hear her voice, we catch sight of her hand, her shadow can sometimes be spotted in the wet sand and in other shots her footprints. Likewise we never the see the sea, when the tide comes we catch the water rolling the dice, we hear it continuously as though it surrounds us entirely, but there is no panning shot across its expanse. The focal point of the work is the contact between artist and water, the encounter, the point of meeting. The dice is emblematic of the dialogue between the two. The interplay of human and sea is playful and delicate. The simple act of engaging with the sea in the mode of a game usually played between people, whimsically anthropormophizes the sea. The tone of this engagement with the natural world is quite opposite to the typical representation of nature and especially the sea, as an unruly threatening force, to be dominated or feared. The representation of chance is similarly toyed with: Hart takes an illustrative and cliched symbol of chance in the form of a dice, and then subjects that object to an unpredictable system. The 1 in 6 probabilities of the cube come face to face with the complex dynamic of turbulent water. Perhaps predictably and even prophetically, natural force wins this little duel, the last frame Sea chucks a double six, you can’t get better than that.
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