The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh is currently preparing a major exhibition with Tania Kovats, a British artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation and large-scale, time-based projects exploring our experience and understanding of landscape. Recent major works have included Meadow (2007), a transported wildflower meadow; The Museum of the White Horse (2007), a travelling landscape museum; Tree (2009), a permanent installation for the Natural History Museum; British Isles (2004) and All the Islands of All the Oceans (2005), two series of drawings; The Drawing Book – A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of Expression. In May 2012 a new, large-scale sculpture, Rivers, was installed in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh.
The exhibition in The Fruitmarket Gallery will include an ambitious new work, Oceans, which will be a sculptural presentation of water from all the world’s seas, collected by the artist with the help of a global network of people drawn in by the poetry of the idea of bringing all the waters of the world to one place. An appeal has gone out to individuals and organisations across the world, and the network of water collectors is growing through word of mouth and social media. Bottles of seawater have been arriving at The Fruitmarket Gallery and at the artist’s studio since late 2012, and the network of connections that the piece represents will grow week by week until late 2013, when the piece itself is made.
More information and lovely pictures of the water being collected from some stunning beaches all over the world can be seen on the project's website - www.tania-kovats-oceans.com - and Facebook page - www.facebook.com/tkoceans.
Image courtesy of Moyan_Brenn via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
