Tide Marks

The installation stemmed from the artist's ongoing preoccupation with transitional spaces where the land meets the sea, exploring the intertidal zone and the natural rhythms of the Thames where it met the tidal Bow Creek.

Canvases were anchored to the river bed at low water and retrieved after a single tide by the artist’s team with neighbourhood volunteers from the environmental charity Thames 21. These works of the river were specifically shaped to cover existing windows of natural light in the cellar of a former Electrician’s Shop at Trinity Buoy Wharf constructed in 1835. The installation utilised repeated flooding of the cellar floor by the waters of the creek to physically mirror their patterns of ebb and flow.

The project evolved from detailed research into the heritage of Bow Creek and explored regular documented instances of severe flooding from the 1920s – 1960s as well as the importance of Trinity House, originally based onsite, in protecting the coastline of Great Britain. Not least it acknowledged the continuing future threat of inundation as a consequence of climate change.

Two artist’s books, each bound in canvas stained by the river, documented paths of human occupation and monoprints from the river bed respectively. Further works were made with young people from local schools exploring the transient composition of the river bed.