Spring tide is a collective exhibition of invited artists whose work has a focus on the liminal space created by tidal flow along the coast and esturarys of East Kent.
Across multiple disciplines including photography, installation, cyanotype, collage, drawing and print, we invite you to be part of each artists observation of the space between sea and land.
Exhibitor Information
Participating Artists:
E.J Laven
Growing up Whitstable, with its now long-vanished sail lofts and semi-derelict boat yards, had a profound impact on the way in which E.J.Laven’s artwork was to develop. Exploring stretches of deserted beaches, marshes and the muddy creeks of Faversham and the Swale as well as the chalk coastline of the nearby Isle of Thanet, instilled not just a love of nature and the ‘great outdoors’ but an appreciation and connection with places which had a sense of timelessness.
Collecting and arranging objects picked up from such places fuelled her young imagination, posing endless questions as to their origin or purpose and creating new connections, rhythms and meanings when juxtaposed with others.
An interest in not only the collections of objects they contain, but also the concept and context of museums themselves has also been an influential factor and a common thread running through much of E.J.Laven’s diverse portfolio.
Whilst such objects have often acted as inspiration or components of pieces of work, so too have the materials gathered (– she first dug and fired her own clay from the beach outside the old railway carriage in which she was living as a student on the Sussex coast).
Assisting an internationally renowned land artist; creating site specific artworks with rocks, slate and clay in the expansive Alentejo region of Portugal and carving stone to create abstract forms reaffirmed an appreciation of simplicity and a determination to honour the material used to create and unite both form and surface.
Over the span of her career she has undertaken a number of public sculpture commissions; exhibited regularly; run a small business; delivered community arts projects; been an artist-in residence; made props for a children’s TV show and spent several years teaching Art and Design in schools as well as Pottery and Ceramics to the wider community.
E.J.Laven has now lived on the Isle of Thanet over 20 years where she has renovated an old house; raised a family; grown a vast amount of vegetables, juggled jobs and continued to develop her own artistic practice.
Gemila Boss: The Driftweed Artist
Gemila is a Broadstairs based artist specialising in Seaweed Pressing, Curated Shell Collage and Marine Cyanotype.
With sustainability at the heart of her practice, Gemila forages on Thanet beaches at low tide, collecting small amounts of ‘drift’ (pieces of seaweed that have already become detached from their rocky holdfast and are floating freely). She takes these specimens back home to begin the drying process in her hand made wooden presses before transforming them into delicate works of preserved natural art.
Some of her pressed seaweeds are then used to create striking cyanotypes which she occasionally enhances with acrylics and gold leaf.
Gemila’s shell collages feature carefully curated and painstakingly presented shells, fossils and other beach curios. All are found locally and are chosen based on their interesting shapes, patterns and textures.
When not pressing seaweed or running after her three children, Gemila is also a history teacher and a coastal warden with Thanet Coast Project.
Gemila is happy to undertake commissions.
Dan Harnett
Inspired by his deep connection with the sea, Dan's work blends photography and chromatography, spanning abstract compositions and still life studies. Influenced by his years in the merchant navy and childhood on the Kent coast, he explores the intersection of memory, place, and transformation.
Dan's photography captures human relationships with the sea, while his chromatography practice reveals the invisible—patterns, pigments, and chemical traces inspired by seashells, seaweed, driftwood, and tidal treasures. These vibrant patterns reflect the layered narratives of maritime journeys, bridging science and art.
Seafarers and landlubbers experience the sea differently; Dan's chromatography highlights these contrasts through molecular transitions that mirror our diverse connections with the ocean. Each piece offers viewers a glimpse into the emotions, challenges, and discoveries of life at sea.
Instagram @danielharnett
www.danharnett.com
Claire Gill
Claire Gill’s artwork encompasses a collection of limited edition seascape and landscape prints. These are peaceful, poetic and invented landscapes, which hopefully transported the viewer to a tranquil place.
Claire uses a digital photo montage approach in Adobe Photoshop, digitally cutting out, combining and layering original photographic details to create an entirely new scene. Photography for her is a way of seeing and connecting with the world. She captures objects detailed surfaces and vistas that she feels drawn to, many of which are encountered on walks or trips to the coast.
Claire has always been attracted to found surface textures, such as peeling layers of paint in doorways or on the underside of boats, incidental marks found in the urban environment and patterns made by nature. She sees beauty in these surfaces and the fact that they are made without intention, over time or by accident. She’s excited to use them as colourful marks and patterns in her work instead of creating them with a brush as a painter would. In combination they give her work an element of abstraction which she then contrast with more figurative and recognisable photographic elements. Creating a photo-montage is like solving a puzzle and Claire’s motivation in creating these works as always been to reach a quiet place where all the pieces fit together and everything is resolved.
Claire never plans her work and begins by combining various photographic details. She works on several artworks at one time. It is a slow sometimes meditative process. For her the enjoyable part of the process is the continual adding and subtracting of photographic layers within an image until a point is reached where nothing more needs adding or taking away and the image is found.
Dominic Keshavarz
Dominic is an artist based in Faversham, drawn to the quieter places in his local environment; the places that are frequently overlooked.
The subjects of Dominic's pictures aren’t necessarily the most important thing. He's more interested in evoking a feeling in the viewer – trying to communicate how he felt in the landscape through the drawing.
He uses a stippling technique (small dotted marks) to build up areas of tonal variation. In some ways it’s a bit like a sculptural process, carving out areas of shadow and light in order to create a representation of a space.
In this way the Dominic hopes the works will suggest both an immediate sensation of a place and a more lingering contemplation of time passing in the space, much as one might experience by being in that place in nature.
Dominic was a finalist in the Ashurst Art Prize in 2016 and Columbia Threadneedle Prize in 2018.
He won the Bowyer Drawing Prize in 2018.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dominickeshavarz/
Sam Solly; The Hagstoner
Sam is an multidisciplinary artist creating mixed-media sculptures and paintings. Living near the coast, She is drawn to the ever transient shoreline, the swash and littoral zones, where she explores, gathers, and learns from natural materials in their rawest form. Her practice is rooted in slow processes, intuition, and deep noticing, seeking what is often overlooked: fragments and forms shaped by tide and time.
Each work emerges from materials discovered along the intertidal zone and upper shore. Stones and shells remain untouched, honouring their natural form and story.
Work is created under her alias “The Hagstoner” reflecting the duality within her life, the tension, balance, and quiet conflicts that shape both who she is and the work she creates. Like the hagstone, she is a portal for her practice, a threshold through which stories pass. Her work lives in duality. Like the tidal zone,existing between states, neither land nor sea floor, but a constantly changing threshold. She places herself in the liminal, the space where her sculptures emerge.
Through The Hagstoner, she explores these thresholds, our coexistence with nature, and the systems, visible and invisible, that shape our lives - ever-shifting like the tides.
