This exhibition explores the perception of water beyond the surface. The unseen nature of water; so mysterious it can only be imagined, water as understood by our ancestors, a source of life and fear, and consequently worship, water as an expression of both deep time and of our anthropocene epoch. 

Artist Gerry Davies’ ‘Flood Story’ and ‘Raft Story’ drawings, made with liquid graphite on Mylar drafting film, conjure visions of futures in which the places we call home have been drowned in the rising sea levels. Sculptural drawings by artist Sarah Casey, include several new works created for this Tidespace exhibition. ‘Emergency!’ is a series of fragile, often sculptural, meltable wax drawings. Other works include portraits of post-glacial landscapes, drawn into rock flour created by glacial erosion that has been sourced from these landscapes. All bear witness to the speed of melt and emergence of change in glacial landscapes. Also collaborating with Tidespace, Folklore Museums Network Founder, Peter Hewitt, creates a documentary sound piece - interviews about local water sources and wells of near mythical status, charting changing landscapes and morphing folk tales.

A version of the idiom and proverb ‘still waters run deep’ can be found in Latin, but may originate from ancient Iran 2500 - 2000 years ago. From Shakespeare (Henry VI) to Aesops Fables, to now, ‘still waters run deep’ is used to describe the mysteries of the unseen, a warning that all may not be as it first appears.  Some-one or some-where, despite a calm and quiet exterior, might be hiding complexities, turmoil, power, and potentially danger below the surface. Scottish geologist James Hutton, grappling with the origins of Earth and of Life itself, created the phrase ‘deep time’ a stretch of geologic history, to describe the unseen, un-seeable, below the surface, which he published in 1795, in Theory of the Earth. Regionally based artists Sarah Casey and Gerry Davies, and historian Peter Hewitt, each explore ideas about shifting human relationships to water, water’s unseen qualities, its landscapes, and its capacity to represent time; past, present and future, each though lenses of science, fiction and folk.

SARAH CASEY Over several years, alongside scientists, Sarah Casey has researched ice-covered Swiss mountains, exploring landscapes defined by water, and visualising deep time. Created in, and in response to, these melting mountains, she has developed a large body of work, often sculptural drawings, frequently incorporating the materiality of these landscapes into her pieces, and bringing deeply abstract concepts more clearly into view. Themes of change, transience, what is lost and what is revealed, are evocatively expressed by Sarah Casey though her sculptural drawings of, often poignantly personal possessions, preserved for hundreds to thousands of years, after being revealed by the speed of the melting landscapes of the Alps. These historic artefacts, and the insights they offer from the ‘ice-time-machine’, are fleeting, once exposed, the clock starts again, followed by rapid disintegration. Sarah has created two new site-specific sculptural drawings Wake: Foolish Sands and Rise and Fall, in collaboration with, and for ‘STILL / WATERS / RUN / DEEP’ at Tidespace, which respond to and represents the more local ice-age formed landscapes of her home, here in Dumfries and Galloway.

GERRY DAVIES The rapidity of ice melting, and rising water levels across the globe, is expressed by artist Gerry Davies in his visions of the future. In his Raft series, communities with no land left to live on, appear to gather in specialist communes of trade or leisure. For Flood Story, Gerry’s female divers of the future, are seen re-discovering the landscapes of drowned civilisations below the sea. Cultural institutions, shanty towns, and floating forests, seem to illustrate the excess and denial of the present.

PETER HEWITT Two generations ago, it couldn’t be assumed that clean water would be ‘running’ to each of our homes, flowing apparently endlessly, via it’s own miniature waterfall, the tap. This has radically affected our relationship to water, there is no longer any need to; source, collect, connect or understand water, in our daily lives. The ritual, respect, understanding, and frequently devotion, of our ancestors, to this timeless, life defining life source, is on the brink of being lost. Historian, folk and cultural researcher, Peter Hewitt, has created a new sound piece for this exhibition. Three Wells, collects and curates the sounds and the stories of local places, once powerfully significant, but being forgotten. Two of the Three Wells, are just over a mile from Tidespace. Some are as ‘real’ and relevant in living memory, as when they were told in the 16th century, to older members of Kirkcudbright’s community. [A longer version of this sound piece can be accessed and taken out of the gallery at Tidespace, and into the surrounding landscape, or by contacting info@tidespace.uk].