Dirty Water:London’s Low Tide

At low tide on Thursday 21 September 6,000 copies of a limited-edition artwork by internationally renowned artist Tania Kovats were given away at twenty locations from east to west along the River Thames. Produced in newspaper format, Dirty Water, London’s Low Tide is a collection of drawings, images, secret musings and writings edited by old River Thames herself, offered to those traversing the river at low tide on the morning of the Autumn Equinox. Dirty Water was also part of Totally Thames, the annual 30-day season of events celebrating the River Thames

The Drawing Book. A survey of drawing: the primary means of expression

‘The Drawing Book’ was conceived and edited by Kovats. Other invited authors included Kate Macfarlane and Katherine Stout (The Drawing Room, London), and Charles Darwent (art historian and writer). The publication sought to survey drawing as the primary means of expression. The book explored whether it was possible to employ a renaissance model, the commonplace book, which is primarily a text-based model, visually. Drawings were gathered together to explore certain themes that then form a visual narrative rather than a text-based one. The book was also an exploration of the subjective nature of visual memory, a journey into the imagination of an individual, in itself a model of the form of drawing, as a personal and subjective cosmology of drawing. The vast collection of drawings span the history of art and design, including the rich dynamic state of contemporary drawing today. This book examines the relationship between drawing and thinking, and looks at what drawings do, as well as how they look. It is organized into thematic chapters based on the form of a commonplace book. The selected drawings trace the continuous line flowing through detailing how artists, scientists, architects, designers, philosophers understand our world and our experience in it. Originally printed as a hardback copy (January 2006), the book has subsequently been reprinted in paperback (June 2007). The book has been reviewed in Blueprint (Andrew Ross, No. 242, May 2006) and Varoom Magazine - The Journal of Illustration and Made Images (Ian Massey, Issue 2, November 2006)

Emergency

Exhibition Catalogue for the Emergency exhibition by Sarah Casey. Explores drawing and sculpture as means to understand and think through glacial archaeology. Includes photographic documentation and written contributions by Anita Taylor, Gary Sangster, Pierre-Yves Nicod, Philippe Curdy, Tania Kovats, Emma Stibbon and Sarah Casey

SCOPE New Photographic Practices

The photographic practices brought together for this exhibition and publication provide a broad scope of how photographic and lens based media may be used in order to have a visceral and conceptual impact. The methods on show demonstrate the way that artists might pick and choose from the approaches, processes and debates that have arisen through the medium’s history. This collection of work features film, video and photography that demand a renegotiation of the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Visual Art Centre Gallery, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Chin

All the Islands of all the Oceans

‘All the Islands of all the Oceans’, as a body of work was begun in 2001 and made continuously until 2006, including throughout a two-year Henry Moore fellowship at the University of the West of England (UWE) that was awarded in 2004. Focusing on drawing and mapping landscapes, ‘All the Islands of all the Oceans’ records imaginary and existing islands. The initial sequence of drawings entitled ‘British Isles’ mapped every isle or rock separate from the main body of the landmass that is known as the British Isles. Developing this further, Kovats extended the concept to become ‘All of the Islands of all of the Oceans’ and documented the Islands in the Pacific Ocean using the Times Atlas as her source. She then further expanded this to include other oceans, with the aim of creating a floating atlas of her own making. Drawings developed as part of this series were exhibited in two solo shows, ‘Slip’ at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2nd March - 12th May 2002) and ‘Offshore’, Newlyn Art Gallery (19th June - 17th July 2004) and in the group exhibitions ‘You’ll never Know - Drawing and Random Interference’, a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibiton (25th March 2006 - 25th February 2007) curated by Jeni Walwin and Henry Krokatsis with an accompanying publication (ISBN 1 85332 254 7) and ‘International Waters’, Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, USA (4th May - 23rd June 2006)