MARE COLLECTION

From the sun-drenched waters of the Mediterranean to the cooler depths of the North Sea — the sea has always drawn me in. I can spend hours watching waves, scanning the surface for fins or movement, imagining the life unfolding just beneath. There is something about the ocean that feels endless and intimate at once.

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I live close to the North Sea and grew up looking out over its horizon — back when it still felt vast and untouched, not yet scattered with wind turbines and shipping routes. That view held a kind of mystery, a sense that anything could be swimming just beyond sight.

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The Mediterranean Sea, especially around Elba, holds a special place in my heart. I have seen dolphins dancing through the waves, a tuna flashing by like a bolt of silver, and once flirted with an octopus who came out from its hiding place to inspect me just as curiously as I was watching it. I have swum alongside fish, glimpsed sea stars, and marvelled at the elegant glide of a mobula ray — all part of an extraordinary web of underwater life.

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This sea was once teeming with life. But in the past 10 to 20 years, I have seen a striking change. These days, signs of marine life are mostly visible only in early spring — sea stars, crabs, tiny hermit crabs, if you are lucky. By late summer, the water often feels warm and strangely lifeless. It is something you feel not just with your eyes, but in your body.

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As David Attenborough said in his recent film Ocean, the Mediterranean is now one of the most heavily impacted seas in the world — affected by overfishing, rising temperatures, dense boat traffic and pollution. And sadly, it shows.

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Elba lies within the Pelagos Sanctuary, a vast protected area that is home to an astonishing 8,500 macroscopic marine species — up to 18% of all known marine life. And yet, even here, marine biodiversity is under pressure from overfishing, climate change, marine traffic, plastic pollution, and mass tourism.

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This collection is a tribute to the sea in all its forms — wild, delicate, mysterious — and to the incredible biodiversity that lives beneath the surface. By purchasing art from this collection, you support efforts to protect and restore marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean, the North Sea, and beyond.