England's Creative Coast: Katrina Palmer, ‘HELLO’ and 'RETREAT’

About

Palmer’s contribution to Waterfronts and Estuary 2021, ‘HELLO’ and ‘RETREAT’, is centred at Shoeburyness, an outlying area of Southend-on-Sea. Through the dyadic dynamic of its two halves Palmer sets up a conversation that explores and articulates the contrasting traditions of the English seaside and the relics of Britain’s military, shaped by the attendant estuarine confluence of currents, tides and undertows, of political, elemental, emotional and mechanical forces and their resistances, that in turn invoke and consider contested notions of Englishness.  

Located on East Beach at Shoeburyness, ‘HELLO’ is a large emphatic concrete form based on a sound mirror, structures that dotted the English coast and were part of an inter-war years pre-radar enemy aircraft early-warning system. The sign HELLO on the mirror’s dish subverts its original intention, transforming it from an object of defence to a sculptural message of welcome that faces out towards Europe.

In response, ‘RETREAT’ is a meditation on identity — or non-identity and how to move towards the future that shadows Palmer’s journeying by foot along the South End-Shoeburyness shoreline. It explores the thwarted desire inherent to repeated and confined excursions; whether it’s the back-and-forth oscillations of the Southend Pier Train and the Funicular Cliff Lift, the circular rides at Southern Adventure Island, or the pull of the tide. Accessed only via a QR sign on the locked door of the Powder Magazine, a Victorian building used to house gunpowder at Gunners Park, ‘RETREAT’ is a web-based piece of interrelated elements: a manuscript (‘Short Story’) explores the emotional act of walking the area, and is complemented by an audio-visual piece (‘Pier’) that emphasises a faltering idea of destination, along with an audio piece (‘Waves’) that collages and layers waves of sound encountered on these journeys.
 
“Exploring the coast at Southend-on-Sea and Shoeburyness is an experience of the precarious edge of England,” Palmer has explained. “I’ve been given this opportunity at a moment of profound uncertainty about our capacity to find a way forward, where the possibility of imaginatively envisaging the future, when our connections to the continent and to the environment and even a concept of common humanity seem distanced ideals.”