Without Horizon, Without Shore

Without Horizon, Without Shore at

Thames side Gallery, London

Geographies of Print, Victoria Ahrens, Carol Wyss and Victoria Arney

The notion of a static view of nature is one deeply rooted in a nostalgia for the everlasting; for contemplation in a world where the imperceptible ebb and flow creates a sense of timelessness and of the eternal. The exhibition Without Horizon, without shore offers a contemplative view of the organic threads that connect us- giving voice to our encounter with deep time, and the intrinsic fluidity and melody of the landscapes we inhabit, both internal and external. These are depictions and sounds beyond visible shores, static horizons. The fragments and mineral particles of this experience retain indelible marks; marks that serve to capture a haptic sense of ourselves and our surroundings- touching, quite literally- on the liminal spaces or connective threads that bind us. In a shifting landscape both metaphorical and actual, where our relationship to our environment captures our attention more than ever, these ephemeral traces of our physical experiences compel us to find new ways to embody them.

Here three artists all working with print, drawing, and mark making as a sculptural and physical embodiment of this fluctuating relationship, look to interrupt the flattened forms of digital existence and bring back a sense of time through touch. The stilled images, the paper, are activated in the space of the gallery through installation pieces, sound and object images that shape how we view the work. They are looking for a language between movement, flux and stillness, between flux and stillness, to bring these Duchampian infra-mince fragments together once more. The artists as witnesses to the vibrations of time, articulate the fragile and the internal, and by unpeeling, unravelling these trajectories of their embodied cognition of these landscapes, give them a voice.

Folds and Faults (la mer) (2024) Projected collage onto three photo etching prints

Using photo etchings, pigment prints and sculptural image- objects, her work explores our imagined encounter with distant places: often mountains, lakes, cliffs and eroded coastlines in order to see what is beyond the map. Working with marginal spaces, where the mineral and human collide, often places used to delineate and demarcate the edges of cartographic drawings, she is looking to question our relationship with landscapes of erosion and disappearance- places that hold and depict ‘deep time’- geological, historic or cartographic time. Her material printed objects are created in situ, imbuing them with the minerals and particles of the place itself.

In this series of prints and print objects, Rose Tinted (Deep Time), Ahrens has been further motivated to explore these natural environments as a way of understanding that which stands still, yet still changes, often imperceptibly. Using imagined combinations of photographic images, rock pigments, coloured filters and sculptural forms, these combinations create impossible relationships between distance and nearness- what is in reach, tactile, mobile- and that which is unfathomable, beyond our reach and longed for. The outside has come inside, at a time when the outside, and far away can only be interiorized and imagined. Performative modes and sculptural installations are part of her response to this.

Made in situ at Barreiro’s abandonned industrial site, as well as along the Pyrite belt and coastlines of Portugal, South West Dorset and the Altiplano of the Andes, these pieces offer a fragmented view of places of extractivist histories and abandon, tinged with the mineral caput mortum of the left over residues of the mining industry. From mountains, flatlands, coastlines to waterfalls, they create their own immersive landscapes that speak of disappearing cartographies of historic boundaries, of the graveyard of the industrial revolution, and the solace of a cyclical, hypnotic return to the earth. Using coloured filters, made with collected rock pigments, the projected collaged films knit together these disparate places to create a single view of a journey across land and water, only to find the ruins of our human intervention tinted with a rose pellicule on these weathered solitary lands.