Tracing Shadows
“People may stand and stare and imagine what lies beneath that pool of water, behind the easy lapping of the insistent waves, with their steady rhythm. Marking time and yet somehow timeless.”
Stephen Wade “Lost to the Sea”
The exhibition, Tracing Shadows, was the latest stage in my ongoing collaboration with artist, Sally Tyrie. Following on from Illuminations, we continued to explore and develop themes inspired by our visits to Bradwell-on-Sea and the River Crouch. This is an area of the east coast of England where changing sea levels have had a major impact on both the shape of the coast and upon human settlement. The history of human activity stretches back through the medieval and Saxon eras to the Mesolithic, but is now reduced to the faintest traces in the shore or enigmatic post alignments on the mud flats. Shadows of the past. A chance find of a Victorian maritime map of the Thames Estuary provoked an interest in the conventions of mapping the coast and in the poignancy of the attempt to fix on paper something that is constantly evolving.
My work for this exhibition included screen-prints, mono-prints and digital prints on both paper and cloth. Photographic imagery was layered and over-printed, exploring ideas of change and ambiguity. A series of work inspired by the maritime map incorporated quotations from Old English texts that refer to flooding.
A catalogue was produced to accompany the exhibition. Available here or from Sally Tyrie.
Exhibition View
Emergent Occasions
Emergent Occasions v
Emergent Occasions i
Emergent Occasions iii
Map
“The ocean streams beat the sea shore” (Eágorstreámas beáton bordstaðu)
“The river in its flow” (Eá in fléde)
“The water ebbed dark under the firmament” (Lago ebbade sweart under swegle)
Tabula Rasa
Tabula Rasa iii
Tabula Rasa v
Artist Books
The Bradwell books feature the same imagery as the Emergent Occasions series. The Creek books feature imagery of the tidal creeks of the River Crouch. The books use layered digital prints on high quality printing papers that have been painted and monoprinted with Indian ink and walnut ink then folded into an accordion structure and presented in a handmade Solander box.
