2019—2023

In this series of Days – totalling 365 miniature seascapes – “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. “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.” These artworks look to the past, to the years they’ve spent on this Earth, while also paying homage to the sea. They speak of function, process, everyday life and the passage of time. Though painted across several years, each is titled for a day of the year. A year which, like those to come, will break ocean temperature records.

Exhibition Page Main Wall David Cass.jpg

“David Cass’s work is very much about watching, in the very real sense of keeping a watch over the tideline, the rising sea and horizon lines, as a long-term artistic monitoring process to alert and warn us. [Here] Cass took on the role of a committed and patient sentinel. By displaying together 365 painted seascapes, he did not simply record the infinitely varying hues of sea and sky but symbolically documented a year of daily changes in the sea level, thereby inviting the viewer to ponder the causes and consequences of the phenomenon and its ultimate effect on the coasts and communities living along them.”

— Dr Anne Hellegouarc’h-Bryce, Sentinels of the Shore: Reconciling Art & Science, 2024