Pre-Release
In just two weeks, Where Once the Waters will open at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition presents a connected pair of art projects, exploring changes in our oceans and along our coastlines caused by global heating. The artworks are the result of over three years of researching, surveying and painting.
One features intimate illustrations of sea, painted upon antique tins, each with a horizon at a different level; the other is formed of several hundred personally addressed letters, describing localised variations in sea level. Installed in an engaging and accessible manner, together, the projects aim to bring home an issue which will inevitably touch us all – in Venice, a city familiar with the mercurial motions of water.
In advance of the exhibition, a selection of the paintings have been brought online, available for purchase. ‘Each painting contains a different body of water, where the horizon line, time of day, and weather conditions vary in every unique view’, writes Kate Reeve-Edwards in the forthcoming exhibition book. ‘The painting process reacts and enhances the objects, working with them to create a new life […] A circular ecosystem of reuse and repair is what Cass is gently encouraging. The hand-held world of the tin is regenerated: these small objects which once contained tobacco, mints, or teabags now convey new, bigger ideas.”
