Wish I could be part of that world

Sinag Fernandez, in response to Temporary Portals by Niamh Woollin.

“as the tide recedes

the sun reveals another world

hidden under the waves

teeming with life”

An ambient scintillating score envelopes me as I dip into Niamh Woollin’s sparkling pool, Temporary Portals. Waves crashing ashore hum in the distance over daytime footage of a rockpool near Woollin’s home in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara.

Filmed over the recent summer on a 2000s-era point-and-shoot, the footage is softened by a haze, lending the scene a sense of wistful nostalgia. Charmingly lo-fi in its low frame rate and handheld quality, the portal is made more enchanting by pink, needle-like strikes of light that punctuate at moments of heightened brightness. These distinctive textures of the ‘Y2K digicam’ glean into the recent revival of older, simpler technologies such as digital cameras and camcorders.¹ Blur, colour distortion, and exporting processes offer an appealing alternative to the seamless immediacy of contemporary smartphone photography, giving the footage the quality of a recovered memory. I first encountered Woollin’s nostalgia-coloured summer rockpools in the deep chill of winter, the exhibition having launched in August. This seasonal distance, compounded by the image’s technological mediation and its memory-evoking affects, produces heightened nostalgia, opening a rift-in-time portal.

*

“I spot movement under the water

as tiny beings live their lives

adapted to the everyday chaos

that the ocean brings”

Woollin closes in on crustaceans and other marine life dancing underneath the glittering pattern of light. I am reminded of Stella Brennan’s Middle Landscape (2009), where wide-angle, fibre-optic images of moss, framed as if looking through a laboratory microscope, bring minute forms of non-human life into focus. Similarly, Temporary Portals uses close-up imagery to direct attention towards forms of non-human life that might otherwise remain imperceptible. In both, text and sound further invite the viewer beyond observation towards a more imaginative looking. Woollin writes, “would my body break like the waves as they hit the rocks / I’d lie in broken pieces staring up at the sky,” imagining the dissolution of the human body into the oceanscape, to be part of that teeming underwater world.

*

“There’s seaweed rotting under the sun

and salt on my lips

and salt in my lungs.”

Winter is biting and unforgiving. I long for the crystal clear brightness of this rockwater pool, the wet kiss of effervescent heat, the surrendered rotting seaweed, and my saltcrusted skin. Shifting seasons, I enter this temporary portal, basking in the far summer sun.

1. Chris Velazco, “Compact Digital Cameras Are Having a Moment. Why the Allure?,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/26/digital-camera-gen-z-vintage-photos/