From the river

I hear voices,

Like souls abandoned

Curlews are calling

From Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River, 1964

MUD
By bringing the mud into the gallery I want people to focus on that mud, to get up close to it, to smell it, to touch it even. To have a sense of it as the essence of the river. It is the cycle of tides. It is ultimately ‘Time' within the river. The blackness and dankness of the Switch Room highlights it’s materiality and form.

Margin
By wrapping or binding the reeds I am focusing on the individual reed within the riverbed. By using the cotton and linen to bind it gives it a richness that separates it from all of the other reeds. The richness of thread is highlighted by the natural daylight as you enter the Switch Room.
It is also an acknowledgement to Benjamin Britten's Curlew River - based on a Japanese Noh play.

Line
The reeds are set out in a thin straight line with a mud tide mark showing the river’s ebb and flow.
They epitomise the ‘horizontal' of the Upper Alde landscape. The journey through the Dovecote starts with this sculpture, moves towards McCabbe’s photograph on the stairs to finally experiencing the actual landscape outside through the window.