This exhibition explores our relationship to rivers and seas, and to the edge lands around them.

Artworks will feature the built and natural environment, ruined and rewilded. There are abandoned piers and once-grand seaside hotels of the South West, northern industrial ruins, and lakeshore properties ravaged by forest fires in North America.

These landscapes speak about ‘solastalgia’: a sadness and anxiety about environmental damage to homes, land, rivers and seas. But they also speak about possibility: there are rewilded and resurrected landscapes here. Even in the most ravaged places, biodiversity recovery is possible when humans stand back, when ruins are allowed rebirth.   

Wagner’s practice reflects this emphasis on renewability: she works in cyanotype and plant-based anthotype, prints on mulberry paper and cotton rag, processes images in seawater and sand, paints with oils made from reclaimed waste and with natural beeswax. These layered images, and her handmade photobooks, capture the haunting and ever-changing nature of coastlines, riverbanks and edgelands.

The exhibition grows out of Professor Corinna Wagner’s work with the Time and Tide Bell Project, supported by the UK Climate Resilience Programme and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).  One of the new Time & Tide bells created by Marcus Vergette will feature in this exhibition. His bells celebrate the connections between land and sea, but also remind us of rising sea levels, flooding and coastal erosion.

This exhibition is a true partnership project where Wagner has collaborated with poets, film makers, writers, musicians, photographers and sculptors to develop a diverse engagement and events programme. Alongside the exhibition, Wagner’s students from the University of Exeter will present works as part of their final dissertation.

Supported by Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC). Find out more about this project.

Coordinating events, performances and workshops:

Saturday 1 July

• 4-5pm Talk and reading by writer John Clarke. £5
• 6-7pm Tintinnabulation music performance with Marcus Vergette and Coach York. £10

Both events special offer- £12. Please choose this price for one of the events and we will process your free ticket for the other.

Saturday 8 July, 11- 1 Eco-art and creative writing workshop. £15.

Saturday 12 August, 4 – 6  Artist talk and film screening:Tania Kovats and COTIDAL. £5.

*Free places for 15-25 year olds. 

(c) Corinna Wagner, Reclaimed, 2021, large format on aluminium dibond,120 x 80 cm