- Venue
- Space2 Gallery, Watfrod Museum
- Starts
- Thursday, May 1, 2014
- Ends
- Saturday, June 28, 2014
- Address
- 194 Lower High Street, Watford, Hertfordshire, WD17 2DT
- Location
- South East England
All of the materials used to create Jo Atherton’s unique flotsam tapestries have been found on the beach. Always surprising, never predictable, the sea curates relics and presents them to the shore; a temporary narrative replenished with each changing tide.
Balloons from France, Italian plastic shipping tags, fishing gear from The Netherlands, toys from the USA and even lobster trap tags from Canada have all found their way into Jo’s intricate tapestries.
Jo is repeatedly drawn to the Cornish coast which juts out into the North Atlantic Current, a tributary of the Gulf Stream. This coastline serves as a unique collection point for material from all over the planet and never fails to provide a thought-provoking artefact.
Every tide strands a flotilla of disconnected objects, each one of which fulfilled a function in another place and time. In weaving these items together, lost objects are given a second chance to be pondered and read anew.
Much like the stone stools, pottery and metals that archaeologists use to define human cultures of the past, a layer of plastic will one day signify our own throwaway society. We leave a trail of plastic in our wake, but what do these discarded fragments say about us?
