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RUTH WATSON
Cry Me A River 20 June - 20 July 2002 Ruth Watson was in residence at the EAF 17-20 June to make her work in the gallery. This is the last exhibition in the program curated by former EAF Director, Chris Chapman. Ruth Watson's Cry Me A River presented a serpentine 'river' of salt crystal. In the broad swathe of diaphanous, occasionally twinkling salt were the negative shapes of the various continents and islands that make up the mapped world. Cry Me A River presented them for us to discover and recognize - or, if you weren't too geographically attuned, to make out more slowly - in a visual metaphor that read as river, flow and time, but also as cloud shapes (whispily breaking up, becoming more tenuous or stretched out of shape), even reading as the continental drift of tectonic plates. In most readings then, time was suggested - in dimensions that were historical (to do with the rise and fall of peoples and civilizations, colonialism, postcolonialism, the international), geographic and ecological. Salt itself suggests mostly today problems of salinity and, by association, other forms of ecological degradation. Historically salt was also a crucially valuable human resource on which cities were founded and around which much trade took place - a further meaning the weork carried. The register - like Julie London, and her famous song - was both pretty and sad. Ken Bolton A 105mm(H) x 200mm(L) three page fold out catalogue designed by the artist with text by Chris Chapman was produced to accompany the project. |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Michal Kluvanek |