
Land + Water: private view and talk by Tana West
Event Information
Description
Join ceramicist Tana West in conversation about her exhibition 'Land + Water' at Royal Fort House, University of Bristol.
West's work investigates where nature and culture intersect. She works with traditional techniques to make ceramic objects that connect maker with locality and local environmental concerns. She sets out walking, map in hand, tracing the routes of forgotten waterways; seeking out holes in the road to access the earth beneath and finding fragments of a geological and historical past by mudlarking on the banks of the Thames. She collects and uses estuarine mud, excavated clay, brick and rocks to make glazes and clay bodies which are regionally specific.
Tana collaborated with 'The Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts and Futures' (an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project in the Department of Historical Studies, Bristol) on a one-day workshop by the banks of the River Severn in 2015. This exhibition reveals some of the outputs of that day, manufactured in situ by a collective of people from mud extracted from the riverbed at Aust, in addition to Tana's own mud-works.
Peter Coates (Professor of American and Environmental History, University of Bristol, and PI of 'The Power and Water' Project) and Owain Jones (Professor of Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, and PI of 'Towards Hydrocitizenship' project) will join Tana to offer their refelctions on the exhbition, and on working with mud, people and place.