Seaside channels the cryptic gravity of the Tamam Shud case—an enduring mystery wrapped in undeciphered text, anonymous evidence, and a phrase that resists interpretation: “Tamam Shud,” it is finished.

On December 1, 1948, the body of an unidentified man was discovered on Somerton Beach near Adelaide, South Australia. He was dressed immaculately, with no identification, and all clothing labels removed. A scrap of paper bearing the Persian phrase Tamam Shud—torn from the final page of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám—was found hidden in a concealed pocket. The book itself was later recovered from a nearby car, containing a handwritten cipher that remains unsolved.

Jenkins renders this enigma with forensic precision and poetic disquiet. Stylized fragments of the cipher drift across the canvas like unsolvable waves—WRGOABABD, MLIAOI, WTBIMPANETP—resisting translation and echoing with emotional static. Beneath the cipher, mirrored images of anonymous roads extend into abstraction, visualizing a geography of disorientation, a map without compass or destination.

At the center, an orange field houses a laughing figure—an artistic embodiment of mystery itself. His expression is both knowing and unreachable, mocking our endless need to resolve what may be designed to remain unresolved. It is not the man on the beach who laughs, but the condition of incomprehension itself.

A quiet rendering of Somerton Beach and its adjacent buildings appears on the third panel, marked by a pink X—the place where the body was found, and where the mystery took root. Nearby, the word “Barbours” references the brand of waxed thread found among the unknown man’s belongings, a forensic whisper stitched into the scene.

Seaside treats ambiguity as material. Part of the Secret Codes series, it moves through evidence and intuition, turning unsolved death into a meditation on the limits of understanding and the strange poetry of mystery.