Wrack, a transitive verb meaning to utterly ruin. The only context I’ve ever used it in is ‘to be wracked with guilt.’ That’s a pretty strong phrase. Or ‘wracking my brain.’ Equally violent. A new context recently came to me, that of a ‘wrack line,’ which is the depository of flotsam and jetsam that appears on a beach after high water. Makes sense I guess when you consider marine wreckage mixed in with seaweed and driftwood on the ocean.
My experience isn’t so much with oceans, rather it is with the inland Canadian prairie sea of Lake Winnipeg. It’s the tenth largest freshwater lake in the world. So it has no tide but it sure has fluctuations, especially due to wind. A hearty south wind will move the water from the small south basin up into the larger north basin, like the flipping of an hourglass sand timer. In high water storms things get deposited further up the shoreline; fishing nets, floaters, driftwood, parts of cottage docks ‘wracked/wrecked’ by ice, fish bones, zebra mussel shells, kid’s sand pails, pop cans, glass polished smooth by the sand and waves, and always garbage.
Wrack lines contain important habitat for invertebrates and all sorts of lifeforms we cannot see.
This flotsam and jetsam accumulation can be a treasure trove for the beachcomber.
I am a fibre artist. My creations usually contain things scavenged from the wrack line, tonnes of choices after a really good storm.
16′ x 20′ , 2024, Mixed Media (flannelette sheet, thread, perl cotton, map, driftwood, bone, fishing line, candy wrapper, book spine, feather, βlucky stoneβ gastropods, beach glass, rusty bits, screen, weeds, shells, fish bones, recycled clothing bits).
If you can’t see it, a map of hourglass-shaped Lake Winnipeg map is stitched ‘in the water’ on the left (in the photo above.)
There is also a play of words and thought about wrack and rack line. Because some of the piece contains old clothes off the rack.
But the idea of being wracked by choice only came when I hung it up the finished piece. I made it hang vertically, as above. Many people commented on how I’d hung it wrong, “It should be horizontal.” I argued that when you are walking along the beach with the lake on one side and the beach on your other side this is how you would see a wrack line.
As a result I ended up installing two hanging devices on the back; horizontal and vertical.
No one listens to the artist. You put your work out to the public and it takes a life of its own. Maybe the water is actually the sky? Or maybe not.
Which way would you hang it?
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Great post EV! I found the information about wrack lines interesting, and love that the wrack piece is made of wrack and beautifully depicts it! Lake Winnipeg is pretty!
Take care, Annemarie