Debi van Zyl

I suppose I should admit I am back from holidays... back from my diving trip to Fiji.

On the first day I found the first letters for my coral alphabet. There were millions of bits of coral on the beach and throughout the week the alphabet slowly filled itself in. I didn't want to assemble letter forms out of parts of coral. I wanted single pieces. As you can imagine, finding some of the letters was difficult. The S is the only one that isn't a single piece of coral.

I had help from some really lovely kids who were on our trip. They would come to me with options for letters I already had, or were able to find ones I was unable to find myself. One day, while we were all getting off the boats and arriving back at the resort after a day out diving, J.A. came running down to the beach with two pieces in his hand, shouting that he had found the X and the Z. Ah, those little letter-hunters! I miss them.

And of course I left the task of photographing the alphabet to the very last minute, with a crinkly damp piece of paper as my backdrop right before we left the resort. I also left all the letter forms there on the table outside our room, along with all the little shells, seed pods and other bits we found on the beach and in the water.... I miss them too.

{p.s. click on the image for a larger view.... note to self: must sort out how to post larger images}