Tania Kovats

So this is the first episode where we visit an exhibition in a commercial gallery and that we discuss the work of a mid-career artist. We talk about As Above, So Below, the exhibition of the great British artist Tanya Kovatz at Paraffin Gallery. Kovatz is a protein artist producing very different kinds of work. She's also a teacher at Dundee University and she has published two books about drawing. The Drawing Book in 2005 and Drawing Water in 2014. I'm saying this because I was so riveted by the exhibition that I feel like I fumbled her biography. Maybe that is the challenge of talking about an artist who is still developing their work as we speak. As opposed to the big retrospective shows we discussed previously. So just a final heads up or a sort of a sound alert. Because we record in the wee hours of the morning, you may or may not hear my cat Kurosumi's bell dingling in the background. Because there was no one awake in the house to take care of her. The caveats of recording at home. So without further ado, let's dig in. Hello and welcome to Exhibitionist's, where we visit exhibitions so that you have to. We're here to give you some healthy FOMO and to heal you right back. Because you listen to the podcast from all over the world, which is absolutely great. And so we want to give you a glimpse of the London exhibitions, but most of all, we want to explore the body of work of an artist with you and for you. So I am Joanna Pierre Neves, an independent art writer and curator, and I cannot wait to share this episode with you.

I know, me too. I'm excited. And I'm Emily Harding, I'm the co-host. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer. And I mean, before we get started on Tanya Kovatz, I'm curious what what was your week in culture like, Joanna? Oh, my week in culture.

So um yeah, I've been hopping from Audible to Kindle to paperback books because I've noticed that I love, I'm a very voracious reader. But then sometimes I'm talking to people and people tell me, oh, so why did you like that book? And I can't remember anything. I just remember the feeling it gave me. But if I'm trying to make a case for the book, I can't remember it because I read so much. And so now I'm rereading things and I'm finding this way of reading, which is to listen to books because I'm on Amazon Prime, so it gives me credit, so I don't really need to buy them.

Nice.

Um, so I listen to them on Audible, then or sometimes I will have bought them on Kindle, and then I think, hmm, this would be a good listen. And then if I really love the books, I buy them on paperbacks. I've been exploring two books that I really, really love. One of them is called The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy, and the other one is Sarah Polly's Run Towards Danger. I think they talk to the fact that we come to a certain point as women in our lives and we reassess what we've gone through. Deborah Levy left her marriage in her 50s, so she kind of downgraded in her 50s from a suburban house to a small flat. And Sarah Pauli decides to just revisit trauma. Why not? You know, and she unlocks stuff, you know, it's really interesting. You know, in approaching 50, it has been my experience of thinking of the younger Joanna and looking back at her and thinking, okay, so who were you? Yeah, what did you want? And I also have been using Alexa, this is a very technological week in culture. So I've been doing playlists on Spotify of music that I listened to pre-puberty when I was a little girl thinking about the world and really powerful and strong and not yet corrupted by certain expectations of society. And that puts me right in the mood, and I feel really powerful. I think I kind of reclaimed that little girl. So this has been my week in metaphysics, basically.

So I uh we finished Griselda, which is a Netflix series with Sophia Vegara. It was incredible. I mean, it was it maybe not your kind of thing, you know, it's pretty gruesome. I mean, she's uh she was a uh you know a drug dealer and a drug lord in Miami in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But the thing that I loved most was just Sophia Vegara's portrayal. I mean, you know, I I I love modern family and watch it and re-watch it. And when I'm sort of in a low mood, I'll flip that on, and it's like a little digital duvet that you're crawling under, nice story. And I loved her in it. I thought she was just hilarious. And from the moment she gets on the screen, you forget about her entirely. Gloria was the click character she played in in Modern Family. One of the things I read about her is, and they start with this quote from Pablo Escobar, who said that the there's only one man in the world I'm afraid of, and it's a woman, and it's Grisel de Blanco. And I'm now I'm wondering if it was Chico or Blanca, so I might have to check that. But it is, yeah. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, but her performance, it could have felt so trite. You know, it could have been like girl boss, I'm in here, you know, doing what I need to do. And she had such vulnerability around her kids. You know, she was someone who, as a total survivor, I mean, she had uh, you know, pretty horrible husbands on the whole, her first two in particular, it did not end well for them. I mean, I hope I'm not spoiler alert. But it was like, it was just such a just such a refreshing thing to see some just really inspiring. Just the fact that she's an actress that is known for something so specifically and just went out and tried something completely different and nailed it. Cool. All right, so um, would you want to tell us a little bit more about the artist that we're looking at this week?

Yeah, with pleasure. So we will be talking about the British artist Tanja Kovat. She was born in 1966 in Brighton, and as she says so herself, not the gentrified Brighton of today, right? And she also lived in a certain area of Brighton called Whitehawk that is supposedly a bit rough. Um and I did some research about it, and apparently in 2010, it was still uh considered to be one of the 5% most deprived areas of the UK. So a childhood was not one of privileges.

Yeah. And that is Did you know that? I didn't know that, no. Uh but I mean, just in terms of Brighton, the image of Brighton is like, you know, pretty affluent, pretty progressive, you know, it's certainly a queer capital of the UK. So, you know, it has a lot of things going for it that you wouldn't necessarily associate with, you know, 5% most deprived areas of the UK.

You know, another experience of Brighton is the landscape or the seascape to be more specific. So the sea was really important, and this idea of being near the sea all the time was was a foundational experience for her. At 11, she asked to go to boarding school. She asked. And she went she asked to go to like what's that?

That's that's an unusual ask for uh for a youngin'.

I mean, at 11 I had this fantasy of being adopted.

Oh god. Oh my god.

That was the furthest my imagination. Absolutely.

Yeah, the orphan, the orphan fantasy, like that was sort of the dream for a day, and then it'd be like, oh my bad.

So now she asked to go to boarding school and not just any boarding school, she went to a convent. So she was taught by nuns, and she became quite interested and fascinated by the figure of the virgin, the Virgin Mary. At university, when she was obviously replacing all these dogmas with other things, she drew the diagram of the body of the virgin, and she considered the body as a sort of a landform, as an island, and islands are very important to her as well. So this she had quite the journey internally and externally as well, because she also moved to Newcastle, so for higher education, she went to Newcastle where she reconnected with the seascape and she discovered her love for cold water, for swimming in cold water, and this physical embodied relationship with the seascape and with bodies of water. And also she talks about Newcastle in a way, you know, like you're told in linguistics class that Eskimos have 500 words for snow. And I think, which apparently is not true, but you know, with Tanya Kovatz, you kind of sense that she has this relationship to the sea where she can tell you about the colour and the location of a specific sea and how different it is from, say, you know, somewhere else 50 kilometers away. So for her, Newcastle Sea was a very grey sea, very crisp. So she went to Newcastle and then she attended the Royal College in London, and in 1991, she ended up being awarded the Barclays Young Artist Award for a work called Blind Paradigm. She she also has something interesting, Tanny Kovatz, in her journey and in into her career, which is that she is part of that generation, the young, the YBA, young British artists. And there was a lot of attention on contemporary art in the UK in the 90s, you're talking about in the 90s. And there was this support that artists had, uh, institutional support and commercial support in some ways, where really young artists achieved a sort of access to platforms of visibility. And so Tanja Kovatz had her own place within this community of artists that were very different, and she kind of got to a place of visibility quite early in her career. So in in in 1994, she was showing her work in Australia. So this work in particular that I'm thinking about is called Virgin in a Condom. It was uh a small statuette of a Virgin Mary covered anywhere with a condom.

Yeah, the kind of the kind of statuette you can buy in, you know, shops. I mean, I used to live in Jerusalem, you know, there were loads of them in shops everywhere. It was not sort of a statue that she had made herself and rendered. It was it is sort of the common one available.

She said that she had uh she had her in her studio, and I thought, oh, so was she still religious? What was going on? But what's really interesting about her as well is that when she was in boarding school, she had this relationship to the female body through Catholicism. And so she says that they talked about the female body in detail, like they would talk about the vulva, they would talk about the uterus, they would talk about menstruation, uh, about the clitoris, you know, like a very detailed and biological way of dealing with the body, right? Unexpected crazy, yeah. Unexpected, but then it was to turn all that knowledge towards the notion of sin, and so everything you could not do with your body.

Ah, they're in line. Exactly. Yeah. Makes more sense now. Makes more sense. Let's be extraordinarily detailed about what you should not do or think about.

But she became really interested in those specificities and interested in the body of the virgin. With you know, there was a lot of talk about AIDS at the moment, you know, they were talking about condoms a lot in, you know, in the in in the public sphere, and she had probably a condom, she probably had the statuette, and she was like, hmm, I'm gonna, you know, and she just did this gesture, and suddenly, you know, the the virgin is kind of has a sort of a a manga-like uh anime like halo of protection, and that's how she saw it. And she exhibited it in the Contemporary Art Museum of Sydney, and it was an uproar, it was stolen. Oh wow, um, it attracted Christian protests, and it ended up being exhibited again in 1998 at the Museum of New Zealand, uh Te Papa Tonga Rewa. Mispronouncing this, and I apologize for it. For her, this was a big turning point because she realized that she was interested in the female body, she was interested in that body as an island, but she was not interested in that kind of relationship to her audience. So that was a very important experience for her. But what remained for me was this conceptual approach, this very embodied, female-oriented and materialistic conceptual approach to making work, a small gesture. So she lived in Hackney for many years, building her career as a multidisciplinary artist. But she a few years ago she went on a six-month trip to South America, which for her was illuminating and convinced her to move out of London to the countryside in Devon, where she lives in a windmill. So she lives by a river, which for her is very important as well. She is very interested in rivers and in tides. But like Marina Abramovich, she considers herself to be nomadic because she travels around, she has commissions as well, you know, to go to places, to go to certain areas of the world, you know, and to inspect the glaciers or to visit certain islands and to be in boats, um, to look at the landscape. So she is really working out there and bringing all of that experience to the gallery. Just two other traits about the work. See, drawing is of extreme importance to her, a certain kind of drawing that we will talk about for sure. And she looks at water as the sculptor of nature. So she talks about water as being an artist in some ways, which I think is really interesting. And I sometimes see her as a collaborator, not only with nature, but also with the science behind it. She she really is at the crossover between a certain knowledge of environments, of ecologies, and what the elements are doing as well. She's kind of in the middle of it. Yeah, but maybe you wants to tell us a little bit about the exhibition, how it's set up and the space of the commercial gallery as well, which is a very different space.

Thinking of her first work that launched her and the sensationalism of it, of having the Virgin Mary covered in this condom, you might have ideas about what this exhibition might be like. And it is not sensationalist for sure, you know. I mean, as as you've already alluded to, you know, she's a very, you know, not trying to shock you, but someone who is just trying to bring you in, gently, even, you know. I mean, I wouldn't even say, you know, she's trying to thump you with an idea by by any stretch of the imagination, which you might, you know, view the virgin in a condom as being thumped with an idea. Before we get to the exhibition itself, I mean, I just love the trajectory of artists that you get this very clear representation of different phases of their lives and where they are with their work and their journey. And it's all just out there for us to see. Imagine if we all had a representation that demonstrative of different phases of our lives, you know. I mean, I just think that could be an interesting thing to think of. If we were to do an exhibition of our lives, Emily and Joanna, or anyone who's listening. What would that look like? You know, I mean, there'd certainly be like a Jack White manifestation, maybe for both of us.

You know, there being I think that you are describing a certain kind of work that makes you reflect on your life. And I think Tania Kovat's exhibition, as above so below, makes you think of those phases of your life. I mean, we'll we'll explore that later. I love the kind of work that makes you look at your own life and think, what would be the objects? Because there's some objects in the exhibition that would characterize our journey into this life until up until where we are now. And what do they intersect with? We are excluded in Portugal from the Mediterranean. I mean, excluded geographically, we don't belong to the Mediterranean countries, obviously. We do not feel excluded. And I always say, like, you know, because sometimes people, oh, but Portugal's a Mediterranean country, and it's like, no, no, no, it's an oceanic country, and I'm an ocean girl. And you know, and I remember listening to the song by oh god, that that's gonna date me so much, Jane's Addiction, Ocean Size, and thinking that's me, ocean size.

That's a tune. Well, we had oh my gosh.

Very ferrell.

Amazing.

Anyway, but so uh tell me about maybe the experience of being in a commercial gallery and also the experience of coming to see a work that is being constructed. It's in the middle of it. You're the in the middle of the development of an artist's work. How did that change your approach to the to the experience of visiting the exhibition?

First of all, I have to say that this is a paraffin gallery, and nothing against paraffin, but this is the kind of place I would never normally go into. You know, I work in Mayfair, I walk by galleries everywhere. I mean, they are everywhere. And they've always felt to me, as a, you know, not someone who's in the art world as being a bit like a bit cold, a little bit, you know, like, are people can I walk in there? Is that some is that a place I can just walk into? And um, and it was so lovely. Is it allowed? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And um, I went on a Saturday and the pub outside the gallery was overflowing with people kind of having a midday pint sort of thing. And then I walked into the gallery, and I hope I'm not getting anybody in trouble, but there was nobody there. Like there was not even anyone at the desk, you know. So I was a bit like you shouldn't have said that. I know, I know, no, but I mean she came up very quickly. She heard me, she was obviously doing some work downstairs or whatever, and came up. But there was a moment there where I was like, oh, like kind of you know, exacerbated the feeling of, am I in the right place for me?

Because I having worked in commercial galleries, we do have cameras or a sensor or a little bell saying, you know, there's something there, there's someone there, and it's not a coincidence that she came up the stairs to to greet you. For sure, for sure. And I mean But it's true that it it it enhances this thing of oh, maybe I I'm not supposed to be.

Yeah, is am I gonna get yelled at? So I mean, it was fantastic to just have time and space after Paraffin. I went to the Wallace collection, which was heaving, you know. So I mean, the contrast was really nice. So yeah, so it was really it was great to be able to spend that time. And as you say, this was not a retrospective. So it was a slice of someone's work, therefore a bit more manageable than an absolutely enormous show that's trying to capture the key moments of someone's life, like Abramovich and Gustin, which we've talked about. So when you walk in, you see these sea marks, the sea where it meets the sky, and you know, really focuses on that horizon line, which she says is her is her favorite line. It's a it's a sequence of very similar marks that are made that are meant to look like light reflecting off of the sea. And it's not she's not painting the sea. It's not a representation, exactly.

It's more the feeling of the sea.

Yeah, yeah, which I really like. She does some of them on tiles and some of them on paper. And, you know, one had sort of the sea is darker and the marks is lighter, and and other ones with white, whitish tiles and and blue paint, and you know, so they're kind of done in various ways.

The horizon line is usually up above, so you're kind of immersed. In the sea. So she repeats a sort of an elongated oval shape that she paints with a brush in different tones of blue from seamock to seamock. And they're just patterns. It's just a repeated pattern in lines.

And I mean, I love a repeated pattern. But then she does this great bit of work, uh, which is all the islands of all the seas. And this, I found this so compelling. I wanted to touch it badly, but I knew I'd get that was for sure a no-no. I know enough, I know enough about galleries to know that that is something you don't do.

You go from should I be here to can I flip through these pages when I touch it?

Yeah, exactly. So the the all the islands of all the seas is individual framed images. She has transparent paper that is layered upon one another. And so, and it's the shape of different islands. So you're seeing the shape of an island, obviously, most strongly on the top bit of the translucent paper, and then underneath varying levels of shadows of an outline of an island.

It looks like, well, she talks about them as resembling ink blocks.

Yeah.

And that's where you have this idea of repetition of patterns. Some of them are made with three sheets, some of them are made with more, some with less. And suddenly then they're no longer islands, but they're superimpositions of psychological states. She's very interested in cartography.

Yeah.

And so she's interested in the way you mapped out landforms and the way you mapped out land. And she talks about us as being land creatures. Um, we we're not, you know, we don't live in the aquatic element. We're we're we're bound to to the earth, to to the soil. And so she's very interested in the way, you know, we have drawn all of the land that exists and how it is impacted by the sea and by tides, and how it came to be as well. So maybe this is a good time to talk about Rachel Carson because she really loves Rachel Carson. And Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, more famous for having denounced uh the use of DDT of pesticides in a book called Silent Spring that she wrote while she was dying of cancer. So I knew her through this book, and for some reason, I don't know why, I didn't know she was a marine biologist. And when doing research into Tanja Kovat's work, I realized that she wrote a lot about the sea. Tanja Kovatz's work in in and especially in that first um room of the exhibition, there's two levels of the exhibition, there's a ground level and there's the basement level, and in that in that area, it's very much about landforms in the sea, the seas, the sea drawing. There's also a drawing made by the sea, and there's also moons. So that's that's what's so compelling about the work, which is that she goes on to this kind of idea of the inkblot and psychological evaluation of the work. And at the same time, she reminds you of cartography, and she makes you think about these connections and this kind of like psychological relationship to science. Uh it's a focal point of her work. So there's that piece, and there's another one that I know you really like.

Yeah, the moons, the full moon. So she had so she uh had sort of ink and watercolor paintings, I guess. You'd call them paintings. Would you call them paintings?

I'd call them watercolor drawings.

Watercolor drawings, okay. Um, of each of the full moons of 2023, of which there were 13. And so she, you know, they're all kind of named after the sort of Native American terms for them pink moon, wolf moon, etc. And um worm moon. I love the worm moon. Yeah, I gotta love a worm moon. I I took a close-up of one that is now on the screensaver on my phone, and I wish I knew which exactly this one was called, but but they're really incredible. I mean, they they these are ones that absolutely draw you in. So again, it's individually framed moons in a grid on the on kind of the main back wall. I think I'm realizing this about myself, that watercolor is my jam. Like I find myself really enthralled by watercolor. I mean, Barbara Nichols uh was one that you know I was really over the moon with when we saw her at Patrick Hyde. Over the moon. It's unintended. Or maybe it was. Maybe I'm a pony gal. Oh, maybe you did it on purpose. Um but yeah, it's the kind of thing that really brings you in. And when you sit there and look at it, you see that there's it can look sort of black and white and gray from the from the initial glance. But gosh, there's blues, there's greens, there's so much subtlety in there. And it really requires, it doesn't require, I would say. I'd say that you feel compelled, or I felt compelled, to sort of really look into them, which was great. And so she has various um expressions of the moon. So she has the the moon in a month, so 28 days of expression of the moon. She has uh the moon phases, so new moon, full moon, and then half waxing, half waning. So they're kind of in their their different guises, but but yeah, definitely to the point of her wanting to bring us into her work. This definitely was something that for me was like, come look into my moon face. Yeah, it was great. It was great.

The idea of the female body is there with the 28 moons. So the cycle of the body and how it's tied to the cycles of the moon. It's one of the ways to look at the moon and to experience the moon and to experience darkness as well. She also talks about those watercolors are very dark. And so she brings that perspective as she can bring other perspectives. It's part of a collective thing uh in the interest she has in the moon. And so maybe this is the moment for something very different. Maybe I'm going to read something from Rachel Carson's book, if you don't mind, to see around us, because I'm really interested in the connections she makes. And I started reading this book because of her in some ways, because I kept thinking about this experience of Catholicism, and I kept thinking about the idea of cosmogonies and this idea of the whole, you know, embracing the whole of what is. And so when I started reading this the beginning of this book, first of all, she quotes the Genesis in the first chapter called Mother Sea. The first quote that you see is from the Genesis, and it says, And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. So that already made me think of the exhibition at those very dark watercolors and a darker sea mark as well, which could be the you know the the sea at night. And then I started reading an and uh a bit of it that made me think of the exhibition. So I'm gonna read it to you and I listeners, stay with me. It's really beautiful. So Rachel Carlson writes the outer shell of the young earth must have been a good many millions of years changing from the liquid to the solid state, and it is believed that before this change was completed, an event of the greatest importance took place, the formation of the moon. The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon's bright path across the water and conscious of the moon drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance torn off into space, and remember that if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them. There were tides in the new earth long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun, the molten liquids of the Earth's whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened. Those who believe that the Moon is a child of Earth say that during an early stage of the Earth's development, something happened that caused this rolling viscet tide to gather speed and momentum and to rise to unimaginable heights. Apparently the force that created these greatest tides the Earth has ever known was the force of resonance, for at this time the period of the solar tides had come to approach, then equal, the period of the free oscillation of the liquid earth, and so every sun tide was given increased momentum by the push of the Earth's oscillation, and each of the twice daily tides was larger than the one before it. Physicists have calculated that after five hundred years of such monstrous, steadily increasing tides, those on the side towards the sun became too high for stability, and a great wave was torn away and hurled into space. But immediately, of course, the newly created satellite became subject to physical laws that sent it spinning in an orbit of its own about the earth. This is what we call the moon. Isn't that biblical light? It is, yeah. It's kind of a revisiting of the Genesis, and it's beautifully written and so scientifically precise.

And it, you know, kind of as you're reading, it's like, you know, I was just feeling this great relaxation in my soul. It's like because there are these enormous forces at work that we are not in control of. And that is a great reminder for all of the power we like to think we have. It's really reassuring to know that there's a lot more power outside of us that we are subject to. Oh, that was great. Thank you for sharing that.

Um I wanted to share it because I'm just loving that book. And Tanja Kovatz draws the cover of each book, each edition she finds of this book. And she draws a lot of books actually. Books are important to her. It's interesting what you said because that's kind of the tone of the exhibition, isn't it? And you know, another conceptual artist called Douglas Hubler said something really interesting. It's a whole text, but I think the most quoted bit of that text is the world is full of objects. I'm not interested in adding anything else or adding any more to it, is this idea that you are placing yourself somewhere in reality and you are a sort of an interface between forces, and and and she kind of gives you some hints and kind of draws you in slowly, um, especially with the moon watercolors, which are actually fantastic. But also the other drawing in the exhibition, which is a drawing made by the sea.

There's another uh drawing on that top floor that's kind of rhythmic lines, which was uh a drawing that was drawn by the sea, because she put a pen on a pendulum on a ferry as she was doing a couple of different crossings. And you can see through the marks of the pen what the sea was like. So rhythmic and long and at times short and choppy, and yeah, it was just a I mean, in a really interesting expression and representation of what she's trying to depict, but in a very different way. And something that was, you know, I guess all of this she's in a way co-creating, right? It's like so that's something that's very much co-created with the sea.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it is a big trope in drawing and contemporary drawing, isn't it? This idea of mark making and just collaborating with an element. There's a very famous couple of drawings uh by William Anastasi called the subway drawings he did in New York, where he had paper in his pockets and pencils in his hands. So he would just put his hands in his pockets, and the movement of the subway of the train would make the drawing. They're considered to be blind drawings in the sense that you're not looking at the pencil or the paper or anything really to produce the drawing. So you're making them in a way that is disconnected from the gaze. And there's a lot of drawing that is made like that, that is an embodied collaboration. This in particular is from uh a specific trip, I think, to the Marshall Islands, and the sea was very different when she went and when she came back, but in reality, what you have is a sheet of paper with two sort of very, very angry diagrams of the sea on the paper that in some ways are talking to the inkblots of the islands, but not in a very formal way. So you wouldn't immediately make the connection between them. So this all takes time and a little bit like the island work, it's layer upon layer upon layer of experience with the work that kind of builds a whole universe. So in the in at the entrance, you also have this beautiful ceramic.

It feels like an outlier, yeah, in amidst all the rest of it. But it is a shell, right? Is it a shell?

It looks like an eggshell. Um, so it it it's a sort of a bowl, but the edges of the bowl are very uneven. And what it is, is the shape of the oceans, the five oceans. I don't she doesn't have five of them there. You kind of think of scale, and going back to the Rachel Carson book, you know, your mind can embrace that scale, but then your body will never be able to experience your body is stuck to that horizon line. And the ceramic balls in some ways are so interesting because they kind of contain a whole ocean and you can actually grab them with your two hands. I just read uh in The Guardian that scientists are studying, and I don't think I would have read this article if I hadn't been to the exhibition, because that's one of the things that exhibitions do as well, is that they kind of p shift you a little bit, they shift your attention. And she so Tanya Kovatz is very aware of climate change. Obviously, that's one of the things that she's worried about. So, what is happening is that apparently the changes to what they call the amok, which is the system of currents in the oceans that stabilizes the climate, apparently because of the melting of the glaciers is being so deeply affected that if this change in the system of currents goes any further in a few years, it will be irreversible. And in that sense, the planet is going to change completely. Some landforms are gonna disappear, um the the marine population is going to change, behaviors of animals are going to change, species are gonna disappear, and our place on the planet is really challenged. Because as we saw in the Rachel Carson passage that I read, the planet is ever moving, and the idea of the tide, and that's why Tania Kovatz um focuses so much on tides, is this idea um that the magnetism of the planet and its relationship to the moon, it's a tidal existence, and we as animals on it are also submitted to those tidal changes. But in some ways, if we're not here, it will continue to rearrange itself forever.

That article that you read in The Guardian, huge downer. It's like after you downer. Sorry. I didn't I shouldn't have blown that up. No, you were reading the Rachel Clanson thing about the moon and you know, the birth, how how the earth gave birth to the moon, and I was feeling so contented about the powers that are beyond us. And then I'm like, oh wow, I think an anvil has just landed on my head, you know. We're all I mean, it it's absolutely true, and you're absolutely right, but oh man, and but you're right though, this is what she's talking about. This is what Tanya Kovat is concerning herself with and expressing on some level through the work she's doing. And that whole thing of you know, the shell, the bowl shell, and representing the Pacific Ocean and you know, getting us, you know, to see scale, that's such an important thing. Because we can't, you know, we we can't we can't imagine these things without art. We can't. And and that's a you know, it's it's so important that she's you know, she's bringing that to us. Should we move downstairs in the exhibition? So the first thing you see is a series of dahlias that are pressed, and they're the last of her summer blooms, which is the title of the piece, and it's very organic looking piece. You almost think, like, is it done? Like, might it change further if you know you were to look at it again in six months or a year? And I think she did this again, talking about the female body to represent menstrual cycles.

Yeah, and the end of them, you know, it's kind of celebrating uh menopause. So the the change in the change, as we call it, yeah, in the human yeah, which is like really? Do you really think this is the first change you go through as women?

It is the change.

And what I really like about that work as well is that the flowers are kind of monstrously different.

Definitely, yeah. I remember thinking that they felt really large. They did seem large and even larger for kind of the dare I say, oozing, you know, that that kind of went out the side of them.

Yeah. She does say that they're kind of like a little bit like menstrual blood, you know, the beginning or the end of the cycle. So she made lots of attempts uh at having these flowers kind of being completely enmeshed with the paper through their oozing, through the the change that they go through. And she was kind of celebrating that and celebrating the end of it as well.

I think I'll celebrate it when it's ended. I'm gonna have a good old party.

Maybe we should just move on to menopause parties. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So then, I mean, other things that she has down there, there's she has more watercolors, which are amazing, kind of works with the India Ink and Watercolor. One of them is called The Sound of Waves is Bubbles Bursting. And that's exactly what it looks like is just a sort of explosion of bubbles, as you could imagine, a wave as it crashes into the beach. And so really atmospheric, like they kind of bring you into it. And the title of the show, um, As Above So Below, is also a piece that is downstairs, it's a diptych, it's you know, one piece above another, one framed um watercolor above the other. And it, you know, kind of shows that contrast between above and below and the relationship between the two.

Kind of when you say bubbles, I mean for our listeners, so it's what remains if you were to bust bubbles on uh a sheet of paper or a canvas, it's so it's white on black, and it is also, I guess, related with Sicily. Yeah, it's the only work that's a number of photographs, like on the smaller size, they're not framed, they depict graves, so you don't immediately understand what they are.

I'm I'm I'm curious to know how you're related to you know, it's noted that it's numbered graves of people who had died making the journey across the Mediterranean to Italy to Lamp Lampedusa, is that right?

Lampedusa.

Lampedusa, yeah. So it's yeah, it's obviously people who have died making this journey, and it's the relationship to the sea, of course, because so many of them would have.

Yeah, but you didn't immediately know that.

No, no, no.

So when you saw so my question for you is when you saw the work, when was the moment where you thought, huh?

Yeah. When your eyes first see it, it's it's literally Pictures of numbers. So I mean, you know, like aesthetically, it's not something that is like drawing you in. Um, but it is once you find out and you read what it's about, that it, you know, it feels, you know, it's it's the banality of it, you know, not to be dismissive of it, but it's not something that's an aesthetic work or and it looks, it's so different than anything else she's done. The the kind of banality of these numbers, and then there's like post-it notes on it as well that's replicating the number, you know, that's when it is archival.

Yeah, totally. That's for me. I thought, oh, what kind of an archive is this? Because it's cement, it's outside, so there's post-its. So you kind of think, what what I mean? The post-its are photographed, they're not post-its on the photographs, and you kind of think, what is this archival thing? And then you see Lampedusa and you think, oh, it is displayed on in a grid. So the grid here replicates the uh how we bury people in some countries, the art historian coming in. The grid's very important for modernism, so it is really something that theorists have written about, thought about, artists have claimed for themselves, you know, all this idea that we are depicting structures, and so the grid was the go-to structure of modernism. And here she picks the grid and she says, Well, you know, let's really think about grids. What what do they mean? They're using cartography, so they're upstairs on the island thing, so they're used to organize thought. And I think it's her that I heard talking about the fact that what kind of hubris you have to have to look at the sky and just place a grid over there in order to organize it. And then you have the grid downstairs, and you know, it's in the basement, so you're kind of underground, and you have that those graves there in a grid. Yeah. So, you know, it's kind of a sort of a kick in the butt of modernism as well.

I mean, she's kind of like, like, yeah, go ahead and try and make sense of this. You know, people are dying in the sea because they are trying to find a life where they are not under threat immediately. Um, yeah, absolutely. It's almost kind of like a thumb, a thumb in the in the eye of the scientist, in a way.

Yeah, absolutely. And she's she doesn't say it immediately. So the way we even us, when we talked about the work, we didn't say immediately that these were graves of migrants. And this was the big, I think, 2013 disaster of many migrants drowning as they were arriving to Italy, to Lampedusa, which is something that has become so common nowadays. Downer alert, um, I'm gonna talk about something really terrible. And as she was reading about this tragedy, she learned that uh one of the people in the team that was recuperating, retrieving the bodies from the sea, um found a mother and a child still connected by the umbilical cord, which means that as she was dying, she was giving birth. And that story kind of stayed with her. She doesn't talk about it in the work, um, but but she she does bring it up when she physically in the work, the story is not there, but when she talks about it, she she does bring it up. And it's a very difficult story to talk about. Um, and I was being told that story as I was looking at the work because that happens a lot for professionals, you know, we come to exhibitions and people welcome us. You get to these places where you're talking about daunting things and tragedies. And so the the director was telling me about the story, and her eyes were were a bit wet, you know. She was she was it was hard for her to tell the story, it was hard for me to listen to the story. It's it's very difficult to talk about, and I didn't tell the story immediately because I had to stay with it, I had to live with it for a while. And then I opened the Rachel Carson book, and the first chapter is called Mother See, which made me think of her as well, of this woman and her child. And of course, ties into the Virgin Mary, and Tanya Kovat said, Well, it was kind of an immaculate conception or an immaculate birth, or it kind of made me think again of the body of the virgin, of this idea and this reality of the body, because obviously her fascination with the body of the virgin is because it's an idea for many people, and there was someone who was living, so yeah, this this exhibition goes very, very far. And when you're visiting the show and and have to talk about it, trying to remain socially acceptable and not weeping distraughtly in front of someone is sometimes difficult in my line of work.

Yeah, I mean you say that that's a that's an image of this woman connected to her baby, you know, being, you know, saved from the or recovered, their bodies being recovered from the sea. It's like I think that is now in my mind forever as well, and yours, and probably anybody who has heard of this story. I mean, you know, it's such a tragic outcome for the I mean, my mind goes to the, you know, the international politics surrounding all of this stuff. It's it's such a it's such a tragedy of policymakers and people not able to do what we need to do for the dire situations that people are fleeing from around the world. And I mean, of course, we can't solve every problem, but there's there's a way out of this that that we that we don't uh that we're not addressing. But yeah, wow, huge downer. But um there's the there's um there's a there's a a very, you know, a very sweet work installation that she has um in the it's kind of last bit of the exhibition that's underneath the stairs, which is her son's school shoes from the time he starts to go to school to the time that he leaves school. And these are all, you know, for kids who grew up going to schools with uniforms. These are all sort of the school shoes you wear with your uniform, kind of matte, black, you know, some with velcro, some with laces. They are there very little variation in the style overall. Um, and you just see them from small to large and everything in between, which is quite sweet.

It's such a sweet. So for our listeners who are not in the UK, uh, so children use uniforms here, and so these are specifically called school shoes. So, in every family um that has children and um who has children going to school, you have to go through the process of buying school shoes every year, sometimes twice a year when they're growing up really, really fast. Growth, you know, the this first moment of the of a person's life is the sculptor of this work because this the shoes like water in the rock are kind of molded by the foot that wears them. And so, in some ways, again, it's this idea of not adding anything to the world, but just like looking at what is out there and just displaying it in a way that makes you see things and that is understated. Yeah, you have to say, you know, it is this one's a very powerful one, but it is still understated. Those shoes are under the stairs, and they're just kind of lined up, like a line traced by a pencil. They are a bit of a drawing as well, and they're just there to kind of like make you think of if you look really closely, change is always happening.

And it's a representation of scale as well, just like the bowl is a representation of scale of the Pacific Ocean, and she has other bowls that represent the scale of other oceans, or even how a scientist would represent scale. I mean, a political scientist would show you a public opinion scale in a certain way to try and demonstrate and show you something that you just wouldn't be able to see otherwise. And that scale of going from these itty bitty shoes that would go on a very small person's feet to a very large, you know, kind of young man's foot, um, it's just really nice. It's just a really nice representation of something that, you know, everybody goes through, and no one would have that expression or demonstration of it. I mean, going back to the top when we were talking about how artists are able to represent different things that are going on in their lives or that they're experiencing or is moving them. I mean, this is a very simple demonstration of that on a you know very human relatable level.

Yeah, she talks about it as being a work about loss as well. This idea of you you lose that child as the child is growing up, you are losing that child. Because I always have this idea that my past selves are people who died, like Joanna has died many times. I and I love that, and it a little bit like the Rachel Carson text, it gives me comfort. Um, because she describes the first time her son walked, she says he didn't walk towards me, he walked away from me. Oh wow, and I find that so beautiful. And so the shoes kind of show that she's releasing that being into the world, and of course she's losing that moment, but I think it's also a work about acceptance, and it's very difficult to see it with the Sicily work where you cannot accept that, you can never accept such a thing, and to have those feelings there side by side, you know, of someone who finally actually had a whole life to live, and that feeling of loss is a sweet, sweet feeling of loss, whereas the other feeling of loss is a daunting, terrifying, abysmal feeling of loss, it's tragic, and you will never come to terms with it, and you cannot come to terms with it. Incredible. But I have something that I wanted to bring up, which is that you told me that this exhibition was a slow burner for you. Yeah, it was not it's not in your face, like it's not so tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, no, I was gonna say that it's sort of true confession time. So, I mean, when I, you know, first entered the gallery and was going through it, I liked it a lot. You know, it's not as though I didn't enjoy it, but the depth of the connection that I had to it was increased massively by reading into who she is and what she was expressing and trying to express and the kind of ideas that she was working with as she was putting it together. And frankly, you know, just kind of throughout her career. I mean, I saw something else that she did, which was the well. And she it's basically she made this really beautiful public fountain, you know, and the idea that, you know, it has a lot of the sea marks that we see uh in the exhibition, and it's on tiles in this uh spherical cylinder uh of a well, which is where people can go and fill up their water bottles. And it, you know, that that notion of water and the respect for water and what it does for us internally and how it shapes us externally. You know, there's just so much about an artist that can be gleaned by understanding more about who they are, which is part of the podcast. I mean, frankly, from the time we started talking on this recording to now, I want to go back to the exhibition. It's like, you know, there's so much there's so much more depth there than there was when I, you know, first set foot in the paraffin gallery and wasn't sure I was in the right place. And and I mean, I remembered, you know, I used I lived in New York City when I was 21, 22, and and um they were the Guggenheim was having a huge exhibition on Jackson Pollock. And I sort of knew I liked art then, you know, but it was sort of like a something you'd do occasionally, you know, on a Saturday or whatever. And and um and so I was thinking about going to this and I decided not to because I was like, oh, that was just the guy with the paint and the splatters, ah, I don't get it. And then, you know, kind of three was just the guy with paint, and Emily summing up the whole of art history movement in art history in New York School and whatever, you know, just the guy with paint. I love it, splattering it around. I don't know, I don't really get the point of it. It's not you know representative of anything, you know. And um, so I had moved back to Minnesota. And I mean, to be fair, it's like to go to the Guggenheim at that time in my life was a dear ticket. Like the tickets felt expensive, so it was a decision.

And here we go talking about it. We thought we were going to talk about Jack White in each episode, but actually we always talk about it. We do there always comes a point.

Um, but the uh commercial galleries are free, guys. Big, big plus to it. Um, but yeah, so I went home and I had moved back to Minnesota at that point, and then on PBS, the public uh the public channel, they had a whole sort of episode, a whole hour on the exhibition and talking to the curator and talking to people who were close to Pollock about what he was trying to do. And it was at that point that I was like, damn, I missed the boat. Like, I should have gone. I'm probably never gonna see an exhibition of Jackson Pollock, especially at the Guggenheim in New York again. And so, yeah, so just to say that there's there's so much there there when digging into an exhibition and an artist. And and this is you know what we're trying to do with the podcast too, right? It's like to break down the background and you know, where these you know artists were coming from and what they were trying to do, and how we interacted with it, which hopefully could, you know, inspire someone to then but yeah, I was you know, I was thinking about that and about I'm I'm very fond of conceptual and processual practices.

I'm not sure she would define herself as a conceptual artist, but maybe a process-based artist. She'd really interested in process and she defines drawing, which is kind of the axis of her practice, a sort of a process. The process is more important than the outcome. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about this kind of dealing with these issues and dealing with this pain and dealing with the change that the climate's undergoing. And so I was I was reminded of another book that I really love called Braiding Sweetgrounds.

Oh, loved it, loved it. Was that not the most incredible book? Oh, great. Sorry to interrupt to go for it.

No, it's you're right. It's such an incredible book. I mean, it's my book, I'm holding it, it's all used up. Diogo is is listening to it on Audible. It's just I keep going back to it, it's all annotated. Because I was thinking about this. So you have this relationship with the elements, and then you go into the gallery, you go into your studio, and then you go into the gallery space. And how do these things come about? And how do you relate to such a deep, uh, connected notion of the world around us? And how then do you produce something? You know, and I was reminded of a part um right at the beginning of Braiding Sweetgrass. So the the author is Robin Walkimera, and she's from the Potawatomi Nation. So she's one of the indigenous uh peoples of of uh America. And so she is a scientist, but she's also reconnecting with the ancestral knowledge of her people and also other nations, um, other indigenous nations. And so she she writes, I once heard Yvonne Peter, a Gwichin man, a father, a husband, an environmental activist, and chief of Arctic Village, a small village in northeastern Alaska, introduce himself simply as a boy who was raised by a river. A description as smooth and slippery as a river rock. And I was thinking of how Tani Kovatz describes her relationship to the world through water. And what is what does art do then? And then there's another passage in the book where Robin Walkimmera also asks herself, you know, how to connect the scientific knowledge and the ancestral knowledge of her people, and and that she describes as a poetic relationship to the world. And so she says, I am a plant scientist and I want to be clear, but I'm also a poet, and the world speaks to me in metaphor. And then I thought, is metaphor the shape these things take in the studio and then in the gallery space? And then conceptualism is very much about being a literal. It's against it worked a lot. I mean, historically, obviously, in the 60s and 70s, it was a lot about not wanting to represent anything and being a literal. Tanja Kovat has that relationship with the work where she brings the shoes to the exhibition space, but they can't be metaphors because they're not language-based, they're objects. So could they be literal metaphors? Because a metaphor is different than a symbol. So a symbol is something that stands for something else. A metaphor is like you say, time is a thief. So in some ways, you're creating a third thing. And a metaphor is an embodied thing, it could be an embodied thing. You kind of something that becomes something else, and then it's a third thing, and then you have the shoes in the space, and they're kind of like literal metaphors, they're just shoes, they're just there, bringing objects into the art space, turning them into something, because you can say, Oh, these are just objects.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the something like the shoes, you could be dismissive of if you didn't sort of really you know, if you didn't really sort of think of them as a scale, as a representation or as a metaphor, uh, for what it is a metaphor for for for for for.

Oh that was not an easy one.

Yeah, indeed. I got a little stuck there. Um, the objects from the outside, because it did feel like the shoes were a tangent, you know, and maybe even the the graves, the graves in a grid, they they felt so different aesthetically to anything else that she was doing. And it takes some responsibility of the viewer to make the connection, you know, particularly I would say with the shoes, to, well, what is this, what does this mean? And how how does this fit with the rest of what does this make me think of that's relatable to my life? Because it is so relatable, it's just so fundamentally tenderly relatable. You know, having that differential between a symbol and a metaphor, and what is this? What is this piece of art? That's a great question to carry around for anything that you're that you're encountering in a gallery or museum.

We were talking about the bull, and you can carry the bull with your hands. You're embodying something that you're literally doing in your head because you're imagining carrying that bowl, which is the whole of the ocean, and suddenly becomes something else, and you are not ritualizing, it's not a ritual, but you are somewhere else, you're transported through the powers of imagination, through the powers of logic as well. It's also a rational exercise, it is your body doing something and being godlike, or it's powerful, it's power's nature, like is the the follow-up of the Rachel Carson text, is that apparently the Pacific is a sort of a scar on the crust of the earth, because that's where the whole of the granite and a little bit of the basalt went into the moon and created the moon. So that's kind of like a scar of that tide, that tidal force that created that wave that made the moon. So these small gestures that we make every day can be infused with meaning. And that's where the metaphor comes in. The metaphor is a is a weird one because it really is mysterious, it doesn't explain anything. It's just there for you, and it's there for you to carry, like you were saying, to carry with you and to suddenly infuse small gestures, small moments or bigger moments with meaning. She leaves so much space for you as a person.

Looking at the show, what is the one piece you would love to take home with you if you could?

Listen, I'm gonna have a cheeky answer for you. I was thinking that I already have a Tanya Kovat's work at home.

I didn't know.

Of course I'm being cheeky. I don't have a work. I wish I did. And so I I could gather all my the school the school shoes of my kids or could start collecting something that could trace the development of someone I love. It gave me so much, not in the form of an artwork, but in the form of experience, things to read, ways to look at the world.

I'm gonna be materialist and greedy and say, I would love to take one home. Uh, the full moons, you know, for sure. I felt really enchanted by them. I want to go back and see them. I should go back and actually see them before the show ends. Yeah, I don't know. Like in each one of them, there was just so much. I'm looking at my screensaver on my phone right now, which has them, and I think they're just marvelous pieces of work on their own.

And that's it for today. So I hope you enjoyed spending this time with us, and please do not forget to follow us on Instagram at exhibitionists underscore podcasts, and more importantly, to subscribe to our podcast and even eventually, if you have time and a literary penchant, leave us a review, but only if it is 4.9 or above. Otherwise, just stick to your channel, don't write anything, and yeah, don't forget, go see exhibitions, loads of them, because we may pick one of your favorites.

All right. Thank you so much, Emily. Thanks, Joanna. Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next time. Bye. See you next time. Bye.