Moored together, until the final flood

Rebecca Elves

Three vessels, peppered with dust dried from the silt that connects the marshes and the Swale, their forms translating ancient ceremonies through the contemporary landscape: punctured with thirstful openings, calling to the wetlands. Clay, that primal material of earth and fire, making and exchanging, invites reflection on how we come together to consume, and how the landscape consumes us.
The product of evening walks from Harty Ferry’s artesian well as summer turned to autumn, and now again as the winter turns to spring, these forms spring from the interwoven dykes, scrapes and pools which emerge from the landscape. These little wells dotted across the marshes open like so many gullets, swallowing the tide, and find their echoes in the vessels’ openings, tied together by ancient thought-forms preserved in ceremonial vessels found at a nearby Romano-Celtic temple, carried through time with traces of consumption, echoes of ceremony.