The Edge looks at the coastline of the United Arab Emirates as a place shaped by labor, development, and the continual remaking of the land. Made between 2014 and 2017, the series follows the changing relationship between land and sea across a region whose identity has long been tied to its waterways. Pearling, fishing, and trade once defined the coast. Today, oil, tourism, construction, and urban expansion have transformed both its use and its appearance.

I made this work after living and working in the UAE, where I became interested in how quickly the landscape was changing and how those changes were altering daily life. Along the coast, beaches, industrial zones, leisure spaces, and unfinished developments exist side by side. The photographs move through these shifts without relying on the visual glamour that so often frames the Gulf.

Migrant labor remains central to the project, even when it is not fully visible. The built environment of the Emirates depends on the workers who construct and maintain it, yet the structures themselves often eclipse the people who make them possible. The coast appears here as a place under constant revision, where ambition presses against the persistence of the landscape, and where the effects of development remain inseparable from the labor that sustains it.

Exhibited at Circuit Gallery at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto