Shark Bell

At St Clair Beach there is a bell that is rung when a shark is sighted, to call swimmers in from the water. It has been there for decades, a small piece of civic machinery, unglamorous, standing in a place otherwise given over to weather and view. I grew up hearing about it before I ever heard it. It marks the moment a beach you’ve known your whole life turns unfamiliar, the same water, the same horizon, but suddenly not to be trusted.

This series takes that bell as its starting point rather than its subject. The paintings move around the coves, inlets and headlands of the Otago Peninsula: Tairoa Heads, Murderers’ Beach, Allan’s Beach, Lawyer's Head, Harbour Cone, Hooper’s Inlet, Victory Beach, places I knew before I could really look at them, and am only now, at a distance, learning to paint. I left Dunedin some years ago. Painting this coastline from Auckland has meant working from memory, from photographs, and from the particular nostalgia of a landscape that is still called home.

I work in oil, on canvas and on wood panel, building each headland and each body of water in broad, flattened passages of colour rather than incidental detail: dusk violet held against acid green, a cliff reduced to three or four shapes of dark. I'm less interested in describing a place accurately than in holding the feeling of standing at its edge: the scale of it, the changeability of the light, the sense that the ground you're standing on and the water in front of you are only provisionally on good terms.

That is what the bell is doing in these paintings, even where it never appears. Each work is an edge: of land, of certainty, of a place I still call mine. The bell doesn't tell you the water is dangerous. It tells you to pay attention. That's what I'm asking of the paint, and of anyone standing in front of it.

Bridget Fox, 2026