One and All is a new digital project, presented both online and in an exhibition at Somerset House as part of the National Trust’s year of the coast. Trust New Art and Sound UK have commissioned three artists working in sound, poetry and conceptual art to make new works that delve into the coastlines. The project marks 50 years of the National Trust’s Neptune Coastline Campaign.
Filmmaker and project initiator Benjamin Wrigley has worked with Martyn Ware, Tania Kovats and Owen Sheers to capture their routes along the UK coastline and his films form part of the exhibition and installation. Ambitious large-scale projections fill indented arches lining the walls of the River Rooms at Somerset House, taking the viewer directly to the sea, a bell sounds at intervals, marking the high tide of the Thames and voices flow within the rooms in a filmic poem and recorded memories.
Online, the viewer is invited on a 3D journey that allows for interaction with live data maps and stop and start journeys, as well as providing a home platform for the viewing of artists film and sound pieces.
Martyn Ware: What does the Sea Say?
Over the course of summer 2015, a beach hut popped up in the post-industrial seaside locations of Orford Ness in Suffolk, Ynys Barri in Pembrokeshire and the Black Beaches, County Durham, inviting passers-by to pop inside and reminisce.
Sound artist, and former member of electronic new wave bands Heaven 17 and Human League, Martyn Ware has created a soundscape from these captured conversation. For the physical exhibition he has transposed his portable beach hut to sit by the River Thames. Situated on Somerset House’s River Terrace it is a relic of this summer’s activities, marked with its visitors memories, written directly onto its walls.
Ware says: “The beach hut is not only a totemic symbol of the British seaside, but it’s also a mini-recording studio. I thought it would be a lovely thing to take the vernacular of the traditional beach hut and seaside and signs and all that stuff and place it in a more postindustrial landscape”
Tania Kovats: Tide
Tania Kovats has created a changing digital drawing that maps the movement of the tide as it unfolds in real time.
This summer, Kovats worked with the travelling foundry Ore and Ingot to cast a bell during the summer equinox, creating a ritual event on Porthcurno beach in Cornwall, melting bronze into a mould to create the bell that sits in Somerset House.
Suspended within the exhibition, the bell rings to mark each high tide on the Thames. Online the sound of the bell is activated when there is interaction with Kovat’s online visualisation and data drawing that maps the daily tidal rhythms and convergences of the tide as it unfolds in real time. The artist worked with software artist Johan Bichel Lindegaard to programme the real-time drawing, combining Kovat’s analogue photographs of drying salts with a map of the British Isles fed by data sourced from almost 400 coastal locations.
Kovats says: “For some time now, my work’s had water as a really central content to it. Sometimes, actually collecting water. And I see water as a connective element in the landscape. It’s an amazing, kind of, sculptor in the landscape. It literally forms things.”
Owen Sheers: On The Sea’s Land (Ar-for-dir)
Poet, Owen Sheers is interested in the sensory experience of the walk, conjuring the sensory experience of the coastal landscape. He sees a continuity in this timeless confrontation with the sea view, whether seen by our early human ancestors or a 21st century rambler.
Sheers has collaborated the most directly with Benjamin Wrigley on a filmed poem based on his time spent on the Welsh Gower Peninsula, exploring the dialect, geology, sounds and sense of the place. Online, the audio-visual experiences invites the viewer to choose a route, left or right along the coastline in a journey that ranges from Paviland Cave – “the oldest know burial site on these islands” – to the anthropomorphic Worms Head.
Owen says: “There’s something very definite about the coastal journey. So the journey that I’ve chosen I hope moves between two very different and two very significant kinds of features in the landscape. I want someone to feel immersed in that costal experience.”
One and All runs at Somerset House, London until 13 December and is also an online exhibition at www.nationaltrust.org.uk/oneandall
See more images of the One and All exhibition on a-n’s Instagram
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