From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Eroding Bank Series
This series documents the Newcastle waterfront's gradual transformation. For the ontological incompleteness of place, see Newcastle vanishing-architecture hypothesis.
The Eroding Bank Series is a photographic documentation of Newcastle's waterfront, tracking the gradual dissolution of red sandstone banks into harbour water across five years. The unnamed artist—work attributed variously to dust collectors or a Dirtheart-affiliated collective—photographed seventeen identical sites on a sixty-day cycle, creating a palimpsest of slow erasure: each bank recedes by fractions visible only in comparison.
The series shares thematic territory with Smith's ontological incompleteness: the permanent ground becoming unmoored, the boundary between land and sea dissolving into ambiguity. Matching photographs—October 2019 to October 2022 of the Coal Loader's northern flank—produce subtle vertigo; change too gradual to perceive frame-to-frame, yet irrefutable across the series. One site underwent catastrophic collapse between print seventeen and the conclusion; the final photograph shows only water where the bank had been.
The most disputed element: a single photograph (print nine, catalogued only by corrupted filename—Riverbed_Geological_Survey_Early_Season_1970.txt) depicts a sandstone formation that matches no documented Newcastle site. Geological surveys contain no record of the formation. [citation needed] The photograph itself, when recovered, appears physically older than the surrounding prints.
The work invites Sebaldian readings of photography as witness to erasure, and practitioners of Empty World Meditations have reported walking the sites in sequence as durational practice, each erosion marking one breath of the earth's refusal.