Having grown up in a seaside town in the UK, Hannah Rowan has had a longtime fascination with water and its role in connecting humans to earth. The works Undersea (2023) and To Hold an Ocean (2023) materialise Rowan’s research around marine ecosystems and the intertidal zone, looking at notions of time and memory in water, and the fragility and resilience of aquatic lifeforms. Comfortably fitting into the palm of your hand, oyster shells have been used to encapsulate her research as they hold “atmospheric memories” carried through water encoding time and events in calcite layers, like the strata in rocks. They also improve water quality, increase marine biodiversity, and protect shorelines from flood surges, playing an important part in their self-regulation.
Maria Thereza Alves’s short film Along the Coast (2003) documents a walk taken by the artist whilst on a residency. Having seen no animals for the entirety of her time spent there, Alves captures the moment she sees a dolphin in water contrasted with a dolphin balloon being sold nearby. Alongside the environmental commentary of this juxtaposition, the film regards the notion of cuteness in nature and our obsession with protecting animals or locations that have aesthetic appeal; coastal areas regularly fit into this category for their idyllic imagery that has become a common trope in media. It is by no means an accident that Shoreline has been chosen to be realised on the island Mallorca, surrounded by 555 kilometres of coastline.
Rain Wu’s series The Sea Rises and Totally Still maps islands in seawater and chalk on blue fabric. The artist’s interest in mapping stems from her background as an architect and the 17th Century’s ‘Age of Exploration’ in which maps created of discovered locations served political agendas and disregarded its native inhabitants and nuanced geological forms. Producing these works from perishable materials further highlights a coastline’s or a map’s changing state and their inability to provide non-isolated traits of a world.
YaYa Yajie Liang’s striking, large-scale paintings capture moments of metamorphosis between human, animal and mineral. These transformations can be likened to the changes and flux of shores, where land and sea continuously reshape one another. Liang’s work resonates with the concept of assisted evolution, where adaptation is accelerated by both natural forces and human intervention. Her improvised technique further embodies the unpredictability of life in these areas, with fluid, expressive brushwork and layered textures mirroring the ever-shifting boundaries between forms, species, and environments.
Highly unique, Bianca Hylwa’s experiments with SCOBYs (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) are barely believable. Trek Trax features a dried SCOBY cut out into an anatomical drawing of a figure flipping backwards. The figure is partially anatomical and partially clothed with hip bones, ribs, a femur, flesh, socks and running shoes. These shapes merge with the imagery of a coastline in the background. The work refers to the balancing forces of nature – decay and erosion. In the ground or on the shore, both commodities and bodies are treated equally as materials, stripped of their connotations or histories.
Seana Gavin’s work explores memory and altered realities through surreal collage compositions. Her dreamlike landscapes evoke elements of shorelines and natural boundaries, showing complex multiplicities in which segments are interrelated through fluidity and transition. After the Floods (2017) is a more literal exploration of our changing climate and the impact that it is and will be having on our coast and land, showing through found images the aftermath of erosion and flooding.
Presenting two new paintings on paper, Yulia Iosilzon conjures up a world that lives between fantasy and reality inhabited by amorphous figures. Her paintings are idealistic notions of nature filled with potential and vibrancy that challenge us to look for the beauty that we so often miss in the 21st Century. As our world becomes more polluted and damaged, we need reminders of what we are missing, particularly in relation to coastal areas where this type of degradation becomes so obvious.
Rachael Louise Bailey’s environmentally charged practice has engaged with a specific marine pollutant she has been researching since 2015, self-titled “The Black Stuff”. These spliced inner tubes of repurposed car tyres are used in oyster sea farming equipment and have had disastrous consequences for our ecosystems due to being discarded in the sea and improperly disposed of. Her works Cohabitation (2017) and Rest (2022) use this material as a beautifully haunting reminder that our ocean is drowning in this human-made material. The ghostly figure laying still on the floor draws similarities to the way in which this material washes up on our shores, smothering the environment in the process.
