Thames Narratives

Four visual artists show their preoccupations and responses to the River Thames:

Rosie Barker’s art is a response to her walks along the Thames foreshore and to her collection of objects both natural and manufactured. They amuse, intrigue, excite and delight resulting in drawings, paintings and assemblages. Her view of the foreshore: “Hubbub of city above, peace below. Time and space to think, to view the river, and to search for finds”.

The dynamics of the flow and continuous changes of current preoccupy Abigail Downer’s creative process. Interpreting the weight and movement of tidal water as it is channelled through the Pool of London, Abigail is inspired to work with, and against time, to hold moments of change in a series of mixed media and print images.

During her visits to London in the last couple of years Iina Heiskanen walked by the Thames making ‘notes’ – sketches, words and photos. Her works are abstractions of these notes further fragmented by distance and also by the fact that memory fails. Disconnected from actual places, Iina’s woodcuts form a new reality of the Thames.

One of the central preoccupations of Lucie Winterson’s practice is with River as a subject matter in her paintings where water, in the form of colour washes, overlaps the photographic image. As a Londoner, her work leads naturally into encounters with the Thames addressing the interaction of human and beyond human nature in the City.

The exhibition, sited near the Thames, offers new perspectives, understandings and visual articulations of the river with themes as diverse as tide and time, ecology, memory and history.

Image: Abigail Downer