British artist Tania Kovats makes drawings, sculpture, installations and large-scale time-based projects exploring our experience and understanding of landscape. She
is best known for Tree (2009), a permanent installation for the Natural History Museum in London; and Rivers, an outdoor sculpture in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. This new exhibition focuses on her fascination with the sea.

A highlight of the exhibition is All the Sea, an ambitious new work which presents water from all the world’s seas, collected with the help of a global network of people drawn in by the idea of bringing all the waters of the world to one place. It is joined by new and existing work all of which has to do in some way with the sea. Sculptures referencing cliff formations;
a machine that mimics the formation of mountains;
a sculpture in the form of a reef of proliferating barnacles; a re-orientation of the world in favour of the ocean drawn on a collection of obsolete atlases; a work exploring what happens when two or more seas meet and a selection of drawings made of and with seawater combine in an evocative presentation of the impact of the sea.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.