Erosion and return — a record laid down grain by grain, and a tide that takes it back unevenly. What survives is not what mattered; it is what the water spared.
A real-time work, computed live and never repeating. It runs continuously: deep time made vertical, breathing in and out.
A single sea-stack stands in a tidal dark — a slender column of fine horizontal strata, each layer a moment laid down, oldest at the base and newest at the cap: deep time made vertical, the record readable up its height. There is no horizon, no sea, no sky — only the lit column and a black tide that rises to consume it and recedes to reveal, eating a little more each pass. Where the water has worked longest, the soft rock is scoured back and the hard marker bands are left standing as overhangs — a portrait of what was durable, never of what was important. As the tide falls it leaves the freshly uncovered stone wet and gleaming in cold slate and shale-green, then it dries to matte. And rarely, dreaded, a band the water has undercut gives way: it strains, it groans, it snaps — a stretch of the record taken all at once — and the broken rock falls in jagged pieces to the tide below, raising a splash and slow rings. The wound stays, and the next loss is laid over it. Run it long enough and the column becomes a perfect, legible, trustworthy record — of nothing but the water's indifference.
Sediment lays a record down grain by grain, patient and complete; the tide returns and takes it back, sparing some layers and scouring others to nothing. The survivors are arbitrary — a stratum endures because it was hard, or lucky, or sat above the waterline, never because it mattered. This is the bleakest way memory fails: not loss by neglect, not by overwriting, not by hardening, but loss by indifference — the water does not care what mattered; it keeps what it happens to keep. We are steered by a record that is an accident of erosion: the most honest archive imaginable, and the emptiest — every layer true, and the selection meaningless. It is order given wholly to flow, the exact opposite of a memory frozen so hard it can no longer change. Those are the two ways a record dies. The series keeps a third that is neither, and has not yet shown it.
The series' open fifth, given wholly to flow — nothing struck, nothing held, everything washing; the slowest breath in the series, and a frozen metronome's exact opposite. The tide is the room: a low wash and a submerged fifth that swell and brighten as the water climbs, and a warm third that leans in at the crest and recedes before it lands — the water never keeps it. And you hear the stone fail the instant you see it: a strain that rises and trembles, a sharp crack at the break, a low collapse with a long tail, and a scatter of wet splashes as the pieces strike the tide — sample-locked to the loss on screen.
Tideline is the fourth piece of the series — What Remains — on the fragility of memory, individual and collective. It is the pure-flow pole: where Doctrine has set and cannot change, this one is given wholly to the tide and cannot hold. The two are a pair — the two ways a record dies — and the series keeps a living third that is neither — and saves it for the end.
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces take real processes and signals and turn them into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
© 2026 Joshua Borsman. All rights reserved.