Tania Kovats

‘The main focus of Kovats’ work is how art mediates and communicates our experience of what we call nature, which Kovats views as a set of interconnected processes and systems.’
‘Increasingly her work addresses environmental and socio political implications of her subject, with water being her central focus, the seas and oceans, river systems, maritime culture, coral bleaching, water pollution, flooding, tides, and the beauty of the horizon line.’ (good for diss?)
‘drawing as the most democratic of art forms’
‘She continues to be an advocate of the importance of drawing as it occurs across disciplines, as a direct tool of communication and thinking, a mechanism of meditation, and to celebrate drawing in its expanded form.’ – drawing as a process as well as an outcome – links to my time-stone

A selection of her works can be found here

meditative nature of Sea Mark drawings are particularly reminiscent of my aforementioned ‘time-stone’
many pieces use process of evaporation, especially using salt and inks etc – again very process-driven
‘Playing with micro/macro, the resultant landscapes manifest Kovats’ interest in geological processes by accounting for the significance of water in forming the shape of the earth.’
‘For Kovats, water also registers the passing of time; sea levels constantly fluctuate, whilst rivers perpetually flow. Reassured by the constancy which water provides, several of the artist’s evaporation works register the ebb and flow of the tide.’

Her Oceans exhibition can be seen here

All The Sea is a collection of bottles of seawater from around the world: ‘It also represents an archive of moments in time, recordings of 250 human experiences with – and most probably in – the sea, capturing in bottles a substance that otherwise slips through our fingers.’
‘The geographical locations of seas and their boundaries are defined by the desire to pinpoint and limit geographical areas, to rationalize wilderness.’
‘Where Seas Meet (2013–14) explores the distinctions placed on the blurry borders between different seas.’ – similar to my own exploration of blurry borders between object and material
‘Time is also important to all of the drawings in the exhibition, along with the properties of the materials and their interactions. As Kovats writes, ‘Dipping a brush into black ink and allowing it to flood a puddle of water on dry paper I let a drawing make itself. I am not drawing anything but the drawing. I watch the clouds condense and disperse, a small climate system on the page. The drawing marks time.”

similar themes to the work of Katie Paterson – bringing the cosmic to a human scale, expressing vast concepts of distance and time through household/everyday objects

publication written from the perspective of the Thames itself and handed out at low tide at several points along the Thames – similar tidal dependency as my rock tracking piece
also one page focuses on found materials, especially in terms of mud-larking which is in some ways a London-style ‘wrecking’

thinking about landscapes formed by water – ‘when solid things were liquid’
art as ‘a vessel of the self’
liquid as a ‘stand-in for the self’ – ‘to hold the self is as hard as holding liquid in your hands’

travelling via canal/water – moving at a different pace, everything slowed, moving through green spaces and engineered waterways – very sculptural
‘different lines of communication in the landscape’
‘still, intimate and personal work but connecting to a wider conversation of how we use our limited resources’ (similar goal to my own work)
bottles like ‘liquid photographs, liquid single moments’
distilling the water to just be h2o shares interesting parallels with the idea of pursuing some kind of base materiality that underpins us all – as i touched on with my drawing presence series

you can see what the land is made up of at the coast – ‘it’s cut, it has an edge’
‘a moment between a solid and a liquid’

Published by annacharris