Artist Residency: Tania Kovats
Artist Residency: Dirty Water, Tania Kovats
Year
2017
Client
fereday pollard for Tideway
Artist
Tania Kovats
Service
Commission Management
Location
Various, London
An artist residency culminating in a free limited edition artwork
Dirty Water was the inaugural annual artist-in-residence commission for Art on the Tideway, one of the UK’s most ambitious new public art programmes which launches fifty artworks by leading and emerging contemporary artists over the next five years.
As the first artist-in-residence for Art on the Tideway, Kovats spent a year researching the Thames, investigating and gathering stories, images, maps and drawings made by her and others including Canaletto and Turner, and engineers, scientists and illustrators from the London Illustrated News.
“Dear Reader, I am an old river. I want to tell you some things while I can. There is a current running through this city that has to speak… I am going to share things that are difficult for me to tell, things that trouble me from my lowest tides, and some of the things I think about to lift my spirits. You decide if you can trust me. ”
Dirty Water, London’s Low Tide is a journal narrated by the River Thames conceived by Kovats as an ageing woman within a paradox of memory and forgetfulness, joy, sadness, anxiety and hope as she recalls the highs and lows of the River over the last five hundred years and looks forward to the future. Overlaying the written texts and images are Kovats’ drawings, mapping the artist’s deep engagement with the River over the past twelve months. They frame the river as a topography, a habitat, as the city’s guts and its flush, a workplace, an engineered and contained natural force, and as a means of keeping London free from economic or health difficulties allowing freedom of movement and trade.
At low tide on Thursday 21 September 2017 6,000 copies of Dirty Water, London’s Low Tide were given away at twenty locations from east to west along the River Thames. Produced in newspaper format, Dirty Water, London’s Low Tide is a collection of drawings, images, secret musings and writings edited by old River Thames herself, offered to those traversing the river at low tide on the morning of the Autumn Equinox. Dirty Water was also part of Totally Thames, the annual 30-day season of events celebrating the River Thames.
“We are delighted to be launching Art on the Tideway, which repositions the River Thames as a new venue for contemporary art. A bold, world-class programme of site specific artworks will be created by a group of visionary international and national artists, local communities and cultural partners making this one of the most ambitious public art programmes in recent years which we hope Londoners and visitors to the capital will enjoy.”
Tania Kovats (b. 1966) is a British artist who makes drawings, sculptures, installations, and large-scale, time-based projects exploring our experience, understanding and relationship with the natural world.
Kovats achieved an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1990 and since then has shown extensively in the UK working frequently in the public realm including TREE made for the Darwin Bicentenary at Natural History Museum London, and solo shows at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; PEER, London and Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall.
Her sculptures and drawings feature in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council, The British Council, National Maritime Museum, Government Art Collection and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In November 2015, Kovats presented a new project commissioned by the National Trust at Somerset House, London. She was also nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery: 6th Edition (2015-17).
Tania Kovats is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
For more information and to read or download the artwork see:
www.tideway.london