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Tania Kovats
380 Plays9 months ago
In this third episode, we explore the work of Tania Kovats after having visited her exhibition "as above so below" at Parafin Gallery. We go back to her beginnings and appreciate how far she's come into her exploration of the elements, with a big emphasis on bodies of water.
@kovats66
This is the first time we visit a commercial gallery for the podcast and there is some discussion about the advantages of visiting this type of exhibition space.
https://www.parafin.co.uk
https://www.parafin.co.uk/exhibitions/2023/exhibitions-2023-tania-kovats
There may be some reading as well, as the artist's work led to some new books ! We find out that Kovats' work takes us on a journey into the history of the earth and our own place in it, which means thinking and feeling geologically, politically, socially and even, perhaps, metaphysically...
Music: Sarturn.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Aim
First Gallery Visit and Tanya Kovats Exhibition
00:00:09
Speaker
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 Kovats at Paraffin Gallery. Kovats is a protean artist producing very different kinds of work.
00:00:32
Speaker
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.
00:01:00
Speaker
So just a final heads up or a sort of a sound alert.
Recording Challenges and Host Introductions
00:01:04
Speaker
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.
00:01:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome to exhibitionistas 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.
00:01:49
Speaker
So I am Joanna Pia Nevis, 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.
Exploration of Books and Themes
00:02:05
Speaker
And I mean, before we get started on Tanya Kovats, I'm curious, what was your week in culture like, Joanna?
00:02:13
Speaker
Oh, my weakened culture. So, 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.
00:02:37
Speaker
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 credits. I don't really need to buy them nice So I listen to them on audible then or sometimes I will have bought them on Kindle and
00:03:01
Speaker
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.
00:03:16
Speaker
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 fifties, so she kind of downgraded in her fifties from a suburban house to a small flat.
00:03:37
Speaker
and Sarah Pauli decides to just revisit trauma. Why not? And she unlocks stuff. It's really interesting. 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.
00:03:58
Speaker
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,
00:04:15
Speaker
thinking about the world and really powerful and strong and not yet corrupted by certain expectations of society.
Emily's Media Insights
00:04:26
Speaker
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.
00:04:38
Speaker
So we finished Griselda, which is a Netflix series with Sofia Vergara. It was incredible. Maybe not your kind of thing. It's pretty gruesome. I mean, she was a drug dealer and a drug lord in Miami in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
00:05:01
Speaker
But the thing that I loved most was just Sofia Vigara's portrayal. I mean, you know, I love Modern Family and watch it and rewatch 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.
00:05:22
Speaker
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 character she played in Modern Family. One of the things I read about her is, and they start with this quote from Pablo Escobar who said that there's only one man in the world I'm afraid of and it's a woman and it's Grisele de Blanco. And now I'm wondering if it was Blanco or Blanca.
00:05:50
Speaker
Might have to check that but it is yeah 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 you know, pretty horrible husbands on the whole her first two in particular It did not end well for them. I mean, I hope
00:06:20
Speaker
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 is an actress that is known for something so specifically and just went out and tried something completely different and Nailed it
00:06:42
Speaker
Cool. All right.
Tanya Kovats' Artistic Journey
00:06:43
Speaker
So would you want to tell us a little bit more about the artist that we're looking at this week?
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, with pleasure. So we will be talking about the British artist Tanya Kovats. 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 Whitehall that is supposedly a bit rough. And I did some research about it and apparently in 2010,
00:07:15
Speaker
it was still considered to be one of the 5% most deprived areas of the UK. So the childhood was not one of privilege. Did you know that? I didn't know that, no. But I mean, just in terms of Brighton, the image of Brighton is like
00:07:33
Speaker
pretty affluent, pretty progressive. It's certainly a queer capital of the UK. So it has a lot of things going for it that you wouldn't necessarily associate with 5% most deprived areas of the UK. 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
00:07:56
Speaker
near the sea all the time was a foundational experience for her. At 11, she asked to go to boarding school. She asked. She asked to go. She asked, like, what's that? That's an unusual ask for a young
00:08:13
Speaker
I mean, at 11, I had this fantasy of being adopted. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, my God. That was the furthest my imagination could go. Absolutely. Yeah. The orphan fantasy. Like, that was sort of the dream for a day. And then it'd be like, oh, my bad.
00:08:29
Speaker
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.
00:08:59
Speaker
So 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
00:09:15
Speaker
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 Kovac,
00:09:41
Speaker
you kind of sense that she has this relationship to the sea where she can tell you about the color 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 gray sea, very crisp,
00:10:01
Speaker
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 Artists Award for a work called Blind Paradigm. She also has something interesting, Tanya Kovac, in her journey and into her career.
00:10:20
Speaker
which is that she is part of that generation, the YBA, a young British artist. And there was a lot of attention on contemporary art in the UK. In the 90s you're talking about. In the 90s. Yeah. And there was this support that artists had
00:10:36
Speaker
institutional support and commercial support in some ways, where really young artists achieved a sort of access to platforms of visibility. And so Tanya Kovacz 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 1994,
00:11:03
Speaker
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 a small statuette of a virgin Mary anywhere with a condom
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah, the kind of statuette you can buy in shops. I used to live in Jerusalem. There were loads of them in shops everywhere. It was not sort of a statue that she had made herself and rendered. It was sort of the common one available.
00:11:36
Speaker
She said that 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.
00:12:01
Speaker
like they would talk about the vulva, they would talk about the uterus, they would talk about menstruation, about the clitoris, you know, like a very detailed and biological way of dealing with the body, right? Unexpected, unexpected, yeah.
00:12:18
Speaker
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. Which makes more sense now, makes more sense. Let's be extraordinarily empowered about what you should not do or think about.
00:12:39
Speaker
But she became really interested in those specificities and interested in the body of the Virgin. There was a lot of talk about AIDS at the moment. They were talking about condoms a lot in the public sphere. And she had probably a condom. She probably had the statuette. And she was like, hmm. And she just did this gesture. And suddenly, the Virgin kind of has a sort of a manga-like
00:13:04
Speaker
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, it attracted Christian protests and it ended up being exhibited again in 1998 at the Museum of New Zealand Tea
00:13:25
Speaker
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
00:13:54
Speaker
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.
00:14:08
Speaker
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
Kovats' Connection with Nature
00:14:21
Speaker
lives in a windmill. So she lives by a river.
00:14:24
Speaker
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.
00:14:51
Speaker
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, drawing is of extreme importance to her, a certain kind of drawing that we will talk about.
00:15:07
Speaker
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 really is at the crossover between a certain knowledge of
00:15:34
Speaker
environments of ecologies and what the elements are doing as well. She's kind of in the middle of it. Yeah, but maybe you wanted to tell us a little bit about the exhibition, how it's the setup and the space of the commercial gallery as well, which is a very different space.
00:15:51
Speaker
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. I mean, as you've already alluded to, she's a very, not trying to shock you, but someone who is just trying to bring you in.
00:16:16
Speaker
gently even. I mean, I wouldn't even say she's trying to thump you with an idea by any stretch of the imagination, which you might view the Virgin in a condom as being thumped with an idea. Before we get to the exhibition itself, I just love the trajectory of artists, that you get this very clear representation of different phases of their
00:16:43
Speaker
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. I mean, I just think
00:16:58
Speaker
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? I mean, there'd certainly be like a Jack White manifestation maybe for both of us. I think that you are describing a certain kind of work
00:17:22
Speaker
that makes you reflect on your life and I think Tanya Kovac's exhibition as above so below makes you think of those faces of your life. I mean 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
00:17:49
Speaker
up until where we are now, and what 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 is a Mediterranean country. I'm like, no, no, no, it's an oceanic country. And I'm an ocean girl. And
00:18:12
Speaker
And I remember listening to the song by, oh God, that's gonna date me so much. Jane's Addiction, Ocean Size. Amazing. And thinking, that's me, Ocean Size. That's a tune. Oh my gosh.
00:18:28
Speaker
Very feral. Anyway, but so 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 in the middle of the development of an artist's work.
00:18:47
Speaker
How did that change your approach to the experience of visiting
Navigating Art Spaces as Outsiders
00:18:51
Speaker
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
00:19:16
Speaker
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. There was nobody there. Like there was not even anyone at the desk.
00:19:49
Speaker
Emily 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?
00:20:06
Speaker
because 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 greet you for sure for sure and i mean but it's true that it it enhances this thing of oh maybe i'm not supposed to be yeah am i gonna get yelled at please
00:20:32
Speaker
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
00:20:48
Speaker
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.
00:21:11
Speaker
The sea where it meets the sky and really focuses on that horizon line, which she says is her favorite line. It's a sequence of very similar marks that are made that are meant to look like light reflecting off of the sea.
00:21:29
Speaker
And she's not painting the sea. It's not a representation. Exactly. It's more the feeling of the sea. Yeah, which I really like. She does some of them on tiles and some of them on paper. And one had sort of the sea is darker and the marks is lighter and other ones with whitish tiles and blue paint. So they're kind of done in various ways.
00:21:56
Speaker
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.
00:22:07
Speaker
in different tones of blue from seam up to seam up. 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, 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 it.
00:22:32
Speaker
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. It is. You go from should I be here to can I flip through these pages? I wanna touch it.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So all the islands of all the seas is individual framed images.
Kovats' Artistic Exploration of Nature and Time
00:22:52
Speaker
She has transparent paper that is layered upon one another. 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.
00:23:12
Speaker
It looks like, well, she talks about them as resembling ink blocks. And that's why you have this idea of repetition of pattern. 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. And so she's interested in the way you mapped out
00:23:37
Speaker
landforms and the way you mapped out land. And she talks about us as being land creatures. We don't live in the aquatic element. We're bound to the earth, to the soil. And so she's very interested in the way we have drawn
00:23:58
Speaker
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
00:24:23
Speaker
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
00:24:39
Speaker
when doing research into Tanya Kovacz's work, I realized that she wrote a lot about the sea, Tanya Kovacz's work, and especially in that first room of the exhibition, there's two levels of the exhibition, there's a ground level and there's the basement level, and then that area
00:25:01
Speaker
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 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.
00:25:22
Speaker
And she makes you think about these connections and this kind of like psychological relationship to science. 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 moons. So she had sort of ink and watercolor paintings, I guess you'd call them paintings. Would you call them paintings?
00:25:48
Speaker
I'd call them watercolor drawings. Okay. 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
00:26:10
Speaker
Worm moon. I love the worm moon. I kind of love a worm moon. 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 they're really incredible. I mean, these are ones that absolutely draw you in. So again, it's individually framed
00:26:32
Speaker
moons in a grid on kind of the main back wall. I think I'm realizing this about myself, that watercolor is my jam. I kind myself really enthralled by watercolor. I mean, Barbara Nichols was one that I was really over the moon with when we saw her at Patrick Hyde.
00:26:56
Speaker
Over the moon. It's no pun intended. Or maybe it was. Maybe I'm a punny gal. Or maybe you did it on purpose. 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 it can look sort of black and white and gray from the initial glance.
00:27:21
Speaker
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
00:27:41
Speaker
expressions of the moon. So she has the moon in a month, so 28 days of expression of the moon. She has the moon phases, so new moon, full moon, and then half waxing, half waning. So they're kind of in their different guises. 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.
00:28:12
Speaker
But 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.
00:28:39
Speaker
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.
00:29:03
Speaker
And I kept thinking about the idea of cosmogonies and this idea of the whole, embracing the whole of what is. And so when I started reading 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.
00:29:32
Speaker
So that already made me think of the exhibition and those very dark watercolors and a darker sea mark as well, which could be the sea at night. And then I started reading a bit of it that made me think of the exhibition. So I'm going to read it to you. And, listen, stay with me. It's really beautiful. So Rachel Carlson writes,
00:29:58
Speaker
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.
00:30:13
Speaker
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.
00:30:41
Speaker
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 earthy shell cooled, congealed, and hardened.
00:31:00
Speaker
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 visit 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
Ecological Themes and Influences
00:31:29
Speaker
of the liquid Earth.
00:31:30
Speaker
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 500 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.
00:31:56
Speaker
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-like? It is. It's kind of a revisiting of the Genesis and it's beautifully written and so scientifically precise.
00:32:18
Speaker
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.
00:32:40
Speaker
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. I wanted to share it because I'm just loving that book. And Tanya Kovac draws the cover of each book, each edition she finds of this book.
00:33:01
Speaker
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
00:33:23
Speaker
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 she kind of gives you some hints and kind of draws you in slowly, 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.
00:33:48
Speaker
And there's another drawing on that top floor that's kind of rhythmic lines, which was 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.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, it was just a really interesting expression and representation of what she's trying to depict, but in a very different way. And something that was, I guess all of this, she's in a way co-creating, right? So that's something that very much co-created with the sea.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is a big trope in drawing, in contemporary drawing, isn't it? This idea of mark-making and just collaborating with an element. There's a very famous couple of drawings by William Anastasi called the Subway drawings he did in New York, where he had paper in his pockets
00:34:58
Speaker
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.
00:35:24
Speaker
And there's a lot of drawing that is made like that, that is an embodied collaboration. This in particular is from 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
00:35:46
Speaker
sort of very, very angry diagrams of the scene 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
00:36:05
Speaker
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 at the entrance, you also have this beautiful ceramic. It feels like an outlier, yeah, amidst all the rest of it. But it is a shell, right? Is it a shell? It looks like an egg shell. So it's sort of a bowl, but the edges of the bowl
00:36:35
Speaker
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 it. Your body is
00:36:57
Speaker
stuck to that horizon line and the ceramic balls in some ways are so Interesting because they kind of contain the whole ocean and you can actually grab them with your two hands. I just read 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 shift you a little bit they shift your attention and
00:37:27
Speaker
And so Tanya Kovac 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,
00:37:47
Speaker
apparently because of the melting of the glaciers is being so deeply affected that if this change in this 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.
00:38:10
Speaker
some landforms are going to disappear, the marine population is going to change, behaviours of animals are going to change, species are going to 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 tides, and that's why Tanya Kovetz focuses so much on tides,
00:38:37
Speaker
is this idea 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
00:38:58
Speaker
forever. That article that you read in The Guardian, huge downer. It's like after you- Huge downer. Sorry, I shouldn't have brought this up. No, you were reading the Rachel Carson thing about the moon and how the earth gave birth to the moon and I was feeling so contented about the powers that are beyond us.
00:39:22
Speaker
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'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 Kovats
00:39:39
Speaker
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 can't
00:39:59
Speaker
We can't imagine these things without art. We can't. It's so important that she's bringing that to us. Should we move downstairs in the exhibition?
00:40:11
Speaker
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 a 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.
00:40:40
Speaker
Yeah. And the end of them, you know, it's kind of celebrating menopause. So the change in a change, as we call it. Yeah. Like, really? Do you really think this is the first change we go through as women? It's not the change. It is the change.
00:41:02
Speaker
And what I really like about that work as well is that the flowers are kind of monstrously big. 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 kind of went out the side of them.
00:41:21
Speaker
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 at having these flowers kind of being completely enmeshed with the paper through their oozing, through the
00:41:38
Speaker
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 going to have a good old party. Maybe we should just move on to menopause parties. Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:57
Speaker
Absolutely. So then, I mean, other things that she has down there, 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 can imagine, a wave as it crashes into the beach.
00:42:23
Speaker
And so, really atmospheric, they kind of bring you into it. And the title of the show, As Above, So Below, is also a piece that is downstairs. It's a diptych. It's one piece above another, one framed watercolor above the other. And it kind of shows that contrast between above and below and the relationship between the two.
00:42:53
Speaker
When you say bubbles, for our listeners, it's what remains if you were to burst bubbles on a sheet of paper or a canvas. So it's white on black. And it is also, I guess, related with Sicily.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's the only one 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 curious to know how you're related to them. It's noted that it's numbered graves of people who had died making the journey across the Mediterranean to Italy, to Lampedoza.
Art Reflecting Migration Tragedies
00:43:34
Speaker
Is that right? 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... Yeah, but you didn't immediately know that. No, no, no, no. So my question for you is, when you saw the word,
00:43:53
Speaker
When was the moment where you thought, huh? Yeah. When your eyes first see it, it's literally pictures of numbers. Aesthetically, it's not something that is drawing you in, but it is once you find out and you read what it's about.
00:44:14
Speaker
that it, you know, it feels, you know, 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 so different than anything else she's done. The kind of banality of these numbers and then there's like post-it notes on it as well that's replicating the number.
00:44:37
Speaker
you know, that's when it hit. It is archival, isn't it? Totally, that's exactly the word. What kind of an archive is this, because it's cement, it's outside, so there's post-its. So you kind of think, 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,
00:45:00
Speaker
And you think, oh, it is displayed in a grid. So the grid here replicates how we bury people in some countries as historians coming in. The grid is very important for modernism. So it is really something that theorists have written about, thought about.
00:45:18
Speaker
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 do they mean? They're using cartography. So they're upstairs on the island thing.
00:45:38
Speaker
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 it's in the basement.
00:45:56
Speaker
So we're kind of underground and you have those graves there in the grit. 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.
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's almost kind of like a thumb in the eye of the scientist in a way. Yeah, absolutely. And 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.
00:46:48
Speaker
which is something that has become so common nowadays. Downer alert. I'm going to talk about something really terrible. And as she was reading about this tragedy, she learned that one of the people in the team that was recuperating, retrieving the bodies from the sea, found a mother and a child
00:47:12
Speaker
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. But she does bring it up when she physically in the work, the story is not there. But when she talks about it, she does bring it up. And it's a very difficult story.
00:47:35
Speaker
to talk about 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
00:47:50
Speaker
daunting things and tragedies. And so the director was telling me about the story and her eyes were a bit wet. It was hard for her to tell the story. It was hard for me to listen to the story. It's very difficult to talk about. And I didn't tell the story immediately.
00:48:10
Speaker
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 Covert 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
00:48:40
Speaker
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 exhibition goes very, very far. And when you're visiting the show and have to talk about it, trying to remain socially acceptable and not weeping,
00:49:09
Speaker
Distraughtly in front of someone is sometimes difficult in my mind 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 that 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
00:49:40
Speaker
I mean, my mind goes to the international politics surrounding all of this stuff. It's such a tragedy of policymakers and people not able to do what we need to do for
00:50:00
Speaker
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 a way out of this that we don't, that we're not addressing. But yeah, wow, huge downer.
Symbolism in Personal Artifacts
00:50:18
Speaker
But there's a very sweet work installation that she has in the 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 for kids who grew up going to schools with uniforms.
00:50:46
Speaker
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 very little variation in the style overall. And you just see them from small to large and everything in between, which is quite sweet.
00:51:07
Speaker
So for our listeners who are not in the UK, so children use uniforms here and so these are specifically called school shoes. So in every family that has children and who has children going to school, you have to go through the process of
00:51:27
Speaker
buying school shoes every year, sometimes twice a year when they're growing up really, really fast. Growth, you know, this first moment of a person's life is the sculptor of this work because the shoes like water in the rock are kind of molded by the foot that wears them.
00:51:48
Speaker
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. Yeah. A bit of a drawing as well.
00:52:16
Speaker
And they're just there to kind of like make you think of, if you look really closely, change has always happened. 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
00:52:40
Speaker
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 kind of young man's foot, it's just really nice. It's just a really nice representation of something that
00:53:07
Speaker
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 very human-relatable level.
00:53:31
Speaker
Yeah, she talks about it as being a work about loss as well. This idea that 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. Joanna has died many times. And I love that. And a little bit like the Rachel Carson text, it gives me
00:53:58
Speaker
comfort because she describes the first time her son walked she says he didn't walk towards me he walked away from me 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 work about acceptance and it's
00:54:22
Speaker
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
00:54:50
Speaker
Terrifying yeah 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.
00:55:06
Speaker
exhibition was a slow burner for you. It's not in your face. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, no, I was going to say that it's true confession time. When I first entered the gallery and was going through it, I liked it a lot. It's not as though I didn't
00:55:30
Speaker
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
00:55:57
Speaker
And basically, she made this really beautiful public fountain. And the idea that it has a lot of the sea marks that we see in the exhibition, and it's on tiles in this spherical cylinder of a well, which is where people can go and fill up their water bottles.
00:56:21
Speaker
And that notion of water and the respect for water and what it does for us internally and how it shapes us externally. 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. Frankly, from the time we started talking on this recording,
00:56:46
Speaker
to now, I want to go back to the exhibition. There's so much more depth there than there was when I first set foot in the Paraffin Gallery and wasn't sure I was in the right place. And I remember, I lived in New York City when I was 21, 22, and the Guggenheim was having a huge exhibition on Jackson Pollock.
00:57:15
Speaker
And I sort of knew I liked art then, you know, but it was sort of like a something you do occasionally, you know, on a Saturday or whatever. And so I was thinking about going to this and I decided not to, because I was like, oh, that was just a guy with paint in the splatters. I don't get it. And then, you know, kind of three. It was just a guy with paint. Emily Summing, the whole of art history.
00:57:45
Speaker
movement within art history, New York school, whatever, you know, just the guy with me. 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. And so I had moved back to Minnesota. And I mean, to be fair, it's like to go to the Guggenheim
00:58:08
Speaker
at that time in my life was a dear ticket, like the tickets felt expensive, so it was a real decision. Oh yeah, 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 the questions. We do, we do. That always comes a point. I know, paraffins free, it was great. But the commercial galleries are free, guys. Big, big plus to it.
00:58:33
Speaker
But yeah, so I went home and I had moved back to Minnesota at that point and then on PBS, the public channel, they had a whole episode, a whole hour on the exhibition and talking to the curator and talking to
00:58:54
Speaker
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
Understanding Artistic Intentions
00:59:05
Speaker
going to 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
00:59:15
Speaker
so much there, there when digging into an exhibition and an artist. And this is, you know, what we're trying to do with the podcast too, right? It's like break down the background and, you know, where these 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
00:59:40
Speaker
But yeah, I was thinking about that and about, 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, you're really interested in process. And she defines drawing, which is kind of the axis of her practice, a sort of process. The process is more important than the outcome. I was thinking about that and I was thinking about this kind of
01:00:07
Speaker
dealing with these issues and dealing with this pain and dealing with the change that the climate's undergoing. And so I was reminded of another book that I really love called Braiding Sweetgrates. Oh, loved it. Loved it. Was that not the most incredible book? Oh, great. Sorry to interrupt. Go for it.
01:00:30
Speaker
No, you're right. It's such an incredible book. My book, I'm holding it. It's all used up. Diogo is listening to it on Audible. I keep going back to it. It's all annotated. I was thinking about this. 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.
01:00:52
Speaker
And how do these things come about? And how do you relate to such a deep connected notion of the world around us? And how then do you produce something? And I was reminded of a part right at the beginning of Braiding Sweetcross. So the author is Robin Walkemara, and she's from the Potawatomi Nation. So she's one of the indigenous
01:01:20
Speaker
peoples of America. And so she is a scientist, but she's also reconnecting with the ancestral knowledge of her people and also other nations, other indigenous nations. And so she writes, I once heard Yvonne Peter, a Gwich'in man, a father, a husband, an environmental activist and chief of Arctic Village, a small village in northeastern Alaska.
01:01:49
Speaker
introduced 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 Kovac describes her relationship to the world through water. And what does art do then? And then there's another passage in the book.
01:02:08
Speaker
where Robin Wall Kimmerer also asked herself how to connect the scientific knowledge and the ancestral knowledge of her people, 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
01:02:35
Speaker
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. Tanya Kovats has that relationship with the work where she brings the shoes to the exhibition space.
01:03:01
Speaker
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.
01:03:27
Speaker
And they're kind of like literal metaphors. They're just shoes. They're just they're 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.
01:03:46
Speaker
if you didn't sort of really if you didn't really sort of think of them as a scale as a representation or is a metaphor for what it is a metaphor for.
01:04:04
Speaker
That was not an easy one. Yeah, indeed, I got a little stuck there. The objects from the outside, because it did feel like the shoes were tangent, you know, and maybe even the graves, the graves in a grid, they felt so different aesthetically to anything else that she was doing.
Art as Metaphor for Personal Experience
01:04:28
Speaker
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 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.
01:04:54
Speaker
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 encountering in a gallery or museum.
01:05:10
Speaker
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 bull, 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.
01:05:38
Speaker
It's also a rational exercise. It is your body doing something and being god-like. Or it's powerful, it's power as nature, because 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
01:06:00
Speaker
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.
01:06:20
Speaker
and that's where the metaphor comes in. The metaphor 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
01:06:44
Speaker
looking at the show, what is the one piece you would love to take home with you? If you could. Listen, I'm going to have a cheeky answer for you. I was thinking that I already have a Tanya Covert's work at home. I didn't know.
01:07:00
Speaker
Of course, I'm being cheeky. I don't have a work. I wish I did. And so I could gather all 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.
01:07:24
Speaker
I'm going to be materialist and greedy and say, I would love to take one home. The full moons, 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. In each one of them, there was just so much. I'm looking at my screensaver on my phone right now, which has them.
01:07:47
Speaker
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 exhibitionistas underscore podcast. And more importantly, to subscribe to our podcast and even eventually, if you have time and the literary penchant
01:08:13
Speaker
leave us a review. But only if it is 4.9 or above. Otherwise, just stick to your journal. 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.
01:08:50
Speaker
you