three tides passed

three tides passed was a solo exhibition at Coleman Project Space in Bermondsey, London. The exhibition constituted a single artwork which spanned across the two spaces that make up the gallery: the main gallery space in the front and a projection shed in the garden behind the main building.

The work unfolded as a spatial narrative across the two spaces. In the front space I installed a second gallery floor, slightly diminished in scale in relation to the original and elevated. This was small enough for the original floor to be clearly visible at the wall’s edge but too large for it to be accessed physically. My aim was to produce a subtle floating effect. Elevated wood pallets likewise formed stepping platforms leading to the shed space. The area of Bermondsey where Coleman Projects is located forms part of the original Thames flood plain and is in close vicinity to two underground rivers, the River Peck and the Earl’s Sluice. This is an area that is increasingly vulnerable to flooding with the Thames’ rising water levels. As it happened, it was an extremely rainy period over the course of the exhibition and the logic of the raised floor and pallets was palpable.
 
In the shed space I presented two interconnected films across two monitors on adjacent walls. The starting point for these films was two works by the American artist, Bruce Nauman: Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up Over Her, Face Up (both 1973). The scenarios of both films are imaginary – two actors are asked to imagine the experience described in the titles and they are filmed lying on the floor in the process of imagining it. I re-enacted and documented this process myself. Manipulated still images from my re-enactment formed the basis of the animated films shown on the monitors. This work was a development of my interest in cultural phenomena which grapple (empirically and/or psychologically) with an uncertain division between land and water/ solid and fluid: for example, the threat of quicksand in 1970’s cinematic imagination – both as a source of fear and attraction. Nauman’s films fell into the category.
 
The resulting films that I made are very slow and dreamlike. They are intended as a film installation and don’t operate independently from the site. My aim with the movement across the two spaces that make up Coleman Projects was that the front space be very prosaic, perplexingly matter of fact even, for visitors on the first encounter. The audience’s progression to the back projection shed becomes a movement into a dreamlike space but one which, in hindsight, brings about a different reading of the first space.

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