E D G E

Supported by the Arts Council, this exhibition is the result of a collaboration between three artists using still and moving image to investigate notions of ‘the edge’. The work is inspired by the coastal landscape with its watery terrain and ill-defined shoreline - salt marshes, estuaries, mud flats, tides - and explores the dynamics of the meeting point, defined and overlapping, merging and dissolving.

Dominated by the confrontation between the land and sea, the margins and horizons are in constant flux. The sea, although expressing a compelling beauty with its fluidity and movement, is at the same time, a relentless reminder of an unforgiving and uncontrollable power.

Over the last twelve months, the three artists have responded to weekly expeditions exploring the east coast from Canvey Island in the Thames estuary, through Maldon and Manningtree, to locations further along the edge of the North Sea. This research has led to a body of work that moves between drawings, paintings, photography, sound, video and installation. It moves between the small and quiet to the large and dramatic.

Although developing new approaches for recording their experience in the landscape, the work exhibited has relevance in a much wider context - in the micro and in the macro, and in experiences and memories, leading to implications of vulnerability - ‘living on the edge’, ‘being on edge’.

The work has been specially created to be exhibited in two different spaces that occupy ‘edge’ locations and situations - public/domestic, urban/rural, land/water. The first was held last month at the contemporary Jerwood Space in south east London, near the river Thames. This exhibition focuses on the intimacy of spaces created in a Georgian house on the river Stour in Essex, with strong connections between inside and outside.

JANE GRISEWOOD works in 2D and 3D, and utilises repetitive material processes to form a link between the act of making, retracing memory and recording movement. Her work continues to explore the themes of time and transience where she often uses the ‘line’ as a vehicle for expressing these concerns. For this exhibition she has been focusing on margins and borders as transitional and ambiguous spaces, where things collide and intersect, blur and fragment. New Zealand born, and with a background in book publishing, Jane has recently completed a MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and is now embarking on a Research Degree. She teaches part-time at Suffolk College.


JUDY GOLDHILL’s photography is concerned with the interaction of the uncontrollable: the dynamic of relationships and situations as they arise, both within and without the confines of the frame, where the accident and the accidental overlap. Judy explores the interface of events as they unfold in front of the camera, searching for a purity and a symmetry, in chance situations. For this exhibition she has spent many hours staring at the sea from the East Anglian coast and has recorded the many moods and variations of the sea as it meets the land. A graduate in Fine Art from the Central School of Art, Judy works as a commercial and portrait photographer.


PAULINE THOMAS works in time-based medium exploring empty space, stillness and in-between states using light, air and water as her subject matter. Pauline completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and has recently started a Research Degree. Following a residency in China recording mist, lost horizons and endless rain, a winter in Canada at -25° recording desolate frozen landscapes, Pauline continues to search for vast, solitary dis/locations to highlight time passing and the ephemeral. For this exhibition she has explored the sea as a space where everything is suspended, a space reverie and aporia where layers of time can co-exist.