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Tania Kovats, REEF (2017)
Exhibition
Tania Kovats: Troubled Waters
22 Sep 2018 – 11 Nov 2018
Event times
Mon - Sat 10am - 5.30pm, Sun 12 - 5.30pm
Cost of entry
FREE
Address
- Exeter Phoenix, Bradnich Place
- Gandy Street
- Exeter
- EX4 3LS
- United Kingdom
Troubled Waters is a solo exhibition of new and recent work by the internationally renowned artist Tania Kovats who is best known for producing sculptures, large-scale installations, drawings and temporal works, which explore our experience and understanding of landscape.
About
Water has been a central theme in the artist’s recent work, which has focused on oceans, seas and river systems to reflect on maritime culture, flooding, tides, and the horizon line, while incorporating implicit socio-political and environmental associations contained in these subjects.
The exhibition will include the haunting sculptural work Bleached (2017), a series of connected sculptural works where Kovats described an imagined bleached coral reef, presented in dry aquarium vitrines. The work reflects on the critical state of coral reefs around the world and what this means for both the health of the seas and the security of the human populations protected by reefs.
A new series of drawings record the covers of various editions of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s seminal 1953 book The Sea Around Us, which has been an important influence on Kovats’ work. Captured in forensic detail, these drawings record, not only the changes in illustration and cover design over the decades but also each crease and dog-eared corner of the well thumbed copy in question.
REEF is a new sculptural work that is the first outcome of a wider project that aims to result as part of a functional coral reef restoration project. Kovats wants to invite the viewer to reflect on the potential future for REEF, transforming a single sculptural object to a thicket of underwater sculptures, generating a curiosity for where it might end up.
"There is a problem of ‘remoteness’ in relation to how we think about environmental issues. Art can generate many types of imaginings and solidarities, and I wish to use the platforms I have to reflect on our relationship with the sea, and encourage more connection and agency in how we connect to the natural world.”
A new, large-scale, Sea Mark drawing has also been produced for the exhibition, in which Kovats’ repeated motif in Prussian blue ink emulates the movement of light over the surface of a body of water.
The exhibition has been supported by a grant from The Elephant Trust.
