Six Degrees of Freedom is a response to looking at the late seascapes of the painter J.M.W. Turner, and to the challenges photography faces in expressively rendering the sea.

The project involved attaching a pinhole camera to navigation buoys in the Solent, and making exposures ranging from two minutes to an hour.  The channel flows around Cowes, the town of my upbringing, and an area in which Turner produced several seascapes. It is famous for the strength of its tides and currents.

The project creates an interplay between control and chance. The aspects of control include the selection of the buoy, the choice of the time of day to make the images and the duration of the exposures. There is chance, however, in the unpredictable movement of the buoy. The resulting photographs are renderings of the sea and sky, directly produced by the six directions of movement that affect a buoyant object.