Sea Change

2017

with

Anne Bevan/Ian Butler - video art

Alan Spence - text

Jason Williamson - curator

Commissioned by:

Aberdeen Art Galleries

The sound work Sea Change was created for an exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Aberdeen from June 2017 until January 2018. The exhibition looks at how the sea causes change, for good and bad. Sea Change inhabits two separate spaces. One space is localised around Anne Bevan’s video animation Star Foram and the other is the more global, distributed space of the entire exhibition.

Anne’s Bevan’s work explores invisible or hidden structures that are part of everyday life. Star forams are single cell organisms from the deep sea and these tiny creatures are indicators of changes in our seas - acidification and rising temperatures. The gradual transformation of the texture of Anne Bevan’s image is mapped onto the same gradual changing of texture in the chordal waves (and real waves) which lap in and out. Material alternates between local and global, to create a feeling of immersion within the space.

The exhibition, curated by Jason Williamson, brings together an unexpected collection of seemingly unconnected objects – all of which have the sea in common – to explore how the sea leaves its trace on material objects left behind, and to tell the remarkable stories of extraordinary human endeavour connected to these objects.