Where Once the Waters

Sample

A sample digital version of the book created to accompany David Cass’ Venice Biennale exhibition Where Once the Waters. Purchase a hardcopy here: davidcass.art/buying

Latteria Moderna Castello • Venice davidcass.art/whereoncethewaters

We know that sea levels around the world are rising as a result of global heating. However, due to various factors, the rate of rise from coast to coast is not even. Some locations are experiencing more dramatic fluctuations in sea level and more frequent inundation. This project focusses in on the coasts nearest our birthplaces, encouraging dialogue and aiming to bring home a globally significant issue by charting change across our lifetimes.

A New Aesthetics of the Sea David Gange

In the classic texts on twentieth-century art, the seas of modernist painters are described as infinitely empty and abstract.

The sea’s defining feature is its separation from society. Only recently, with growing recognition of human entanglement with ocean, has attention been turned to those other modernists, such as Peter Lanyon, whose seas were human, social, spaces.

Reading the older texts feels now like entering an alternate reality in which the ocean is unthreatened by human action and humanity unthreatened by the sea.

I’m writing this in Port of Ness: the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. This is a region intimately connected to the treacherous waters that surround it. I can see tall strafing breakers and ripping tidal seams outside my window. There are sea rocks twenty to fifty miles offshore, such as Sulasgeir, North Rona, St Kilda, and the Flannans, which play crucial roles in local stories and economies. They are as much part of the community as the nearby moorland. One reason I’m here is to visit the offshore rocks by kayak, learn a little more of the historic integration of land and sea, and explore the many traces of human action on seascapes many would consider ‘wild’ or ‘natural’. For centuries, sophisticated subsistence economies in this island group made mixed use of moorland, cropland, shoreline and sea,

though their potential to flourish was challenged by the gradual imposition of commercial norms and prohibitive taxation. Even in their most difficult decades, these communities produced hundreds of poems and songs which feature the sea as site of work, pleasure, belonging, exile, and divine judgement.

There is a general perception that aspects of traditional culture here were gradually given up when the easier life of road and factory took people from the water’s edge. But climate played a bigger role than this narrative permits: in the last forty years, in particular, climate change has made the old ocean-facing ways of life impossible. Photos taken in the early twentieth century show luscious coastal fields of oats, wheat and rye. It was dramatic increases in wind and rainfall, not a relocated workforce, that mean those slopes are now uncultivated, and potatoes would be the only option for bringing them under spade. As the frequency of storms and offshore swells has grown, the number of days small fishing boats can put to sea has fallen too. Numerous vessels once worked from local beaches like Tràigh Dhail or Port Arnol but now, as breakers ten feet tall roll in, it is hard even to imagine boats launching except on the stillest and silkiest of days. The new ferocity of wind and water has also led to accelerated coastal change. Look

back to engravings by nineteenth-century travellers and you’ll see dunes stretch out beyond current coastal sites: layer upon layer of land lost in little more than a century.

It is no surprise, then, that the Outer Hebrides – like Venice – have become a frontline in attempts to create a new aesthetics of the sea. Artists congregate here like never before, with marine visions ranging from the sublime shimmering space of Helen Glassford to Will Maclean’s intimate artefacts of drowning and seamanship. One installation at the islands’ leading gallery, Taigh Chearsabhagh (Lines, by Petta Niultyverta and Timo Aho), even girded local buildings in strips of tide-activated LED to indicate predicted future sea levels and show that the gallery itself will soon be many feet below the storm surge. Other artists exhibited here have organised their work round human threats to ocean, making diverse uses of found plastics, nylon ropes, and fishing debris. And the reputation of the region is such that scholars from other coastal regions, such as Anne Hellegouarc’h-Bryce from Brittany, have looked to these Outer Hebridean exhibits to interpret the interplay of art and climate science.

Taking a retrospective of the last ten years at island galleries would feel like looking at a manifesto. This new aesthetics is not primarily about the ocean’s visual qualities, and rarely does it abstract ocean from experience. Always, and unremittingly, the sea is now political. It is not just part of our society but of our bodies. It has a voice that must be heard as we seek alternatives to the unconstrained violence of growth-based economics. Every way in which we now threaten the sea’s delicate balance will haunt our species and all others for millennia. Damage the ocean, this manifesto says, and we destroy ourselves.

There is no better distillation of these messages and their aesthetic power than the art of David Cass, and it is no surprise that his work looms large in any retrospective of exhibitions on the islands.

Where my own writing interprets human traces in oceanic settings, his work does the reverse, exploring in multifaceted ways the traces of tides and floodwater throughout the worlds humans build and inhabit. From the Florence flood of 1966 and the relationship of Venice with its overflowing lagoon, to the universal crisis of what Cass terms ‘Rising Horizons’, the urgency of his message has prompted

rich interweaving of visual and textual components to generate visions that no one medium could communicate alone.

Cass’s use of objects found at markets – worn tins and yellowing spotted paper – emphasises two things. First, that this is a message about the interaction over time of the elemental forces in which all cultural productions are always engulfed.

Second, that this is not a story about the ocean out there, doing distant damage in the form of shipwreck or cliff fall, but a domestic, homely, town-centre kind of apocalypse. His typed letters, each telling a unique local sea-level story, land on doormats with the same soft thunk as birthday cards or bills. If one key role of the modern city has been to dangerously insulate its occupants from awareness that environmental forces even exist, then Cass’s art erodes the myths of urban exceptionalism just as the sea grinds away at Jakarta, Miami, Bruges, and Lagos.

The implications of this universal relevance of ocean are the most powerful messages of Where Once the Waters.

Stand in front of a section of these walls and you’re simultaneously aware of the small intimacy of the object in front of you and the array of expressions of subtly

different seas that drench your peripheral vision. Tidal connections between the Outer Hebrides, Indonesia, Manhattan, and the Maldives feel stronger and shorter than ever before.

The result is that the World Ocean stands in front of you, and you stand immersed in the World Ocean.

Dare you look down?

To do so would be to recognise that it is only a little while longer that you could stand on this spot with dry feet.

How will you respond to being flooded by this vision?

David Gange Nature writer, kayaker and historian • Author of The Frayed Atlantic Edge (HarperCollins) • Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Birmingham

More in the exhibition book, available via: davidcass.art/buying

Last year was yet another record-breaking year for ocean temperatures, just as this year is set to be, and each coming year for the foreseeable future. Among many other devastating symptoms, oceans rise as they warm. That rise is now locked in and accelerating.

It was reading George Marshall’s words ‘…we have still not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brains in climate change’ (Don’t Even Think About It, 2014) that my attitude towards art-making shifted. In every project I’ve produced since, I’ve rallied toward that idea. I am an artist, and as such, I am uniquely placed, allowed to be creative with scientific data. Of course, I don’t believe that my own creative efforts will solve the conundrum Marshall outlines, rather, that environmentally focussed creatives around the world might, cumulatively, inspire enough action to make a difference, each adding to a growing bank of motivating projects. From Bethany Johnson’s strata-sculptures (Safe Keeping, 2020), intimately presenting the layers of damage we’re inflicting on our Earth, to Jesmyn Ward’s harrowing novel (Salvage the Bones, 2011) centred around a Mississippi family who lived through Hurricane Katrina, works are being created that possess an emotional power, perhaps capable of shifting perspectives. Where Once the Waters is my offering.

Many people made this exhibition possible, resulting in many small artworks, made from months of collecting and then painting and writing. The exhibition has been with me a long time – through three studio moves and a pandemic, and through some of the clearest clarion calls of the climate crisis yet. The memory of painting while watching clouds of wildfire smoke fill the sky over the Saronic Gulf will long stay with me.

The exhibition is formed of two installations: one is a series of 365 seascapes painted onto found, antique tins, from around the world, worked on across three years or more but presented as the portrait of a single year at sea – perhaps a future record-breaking year.

The other is a series of typed letters, addressed to individuals around the worldi – participants in a sea level survey – telling of changes in sea levels at their birthplaces, offering figuresii that can be visualised, often because the level of change described can be contained within the sheet of paper the letter is typed upon.

In recent years my artwork has aimed to provide entry points – stripped back, bite-sized pieces of climate change information. Collaboration has been a principal element of these endeavours, reflecting the notion that working together and sharing dialogue is essential in discovering pathways which lead away from that dreaded “point of no return.”

Both works aim to come together, to speak to each other, but also to invite the viewer in on their own terms. Knowing what is happening at coastlines we are connected to might allow us to engage with a topic often shrouded in complex science. Perhaps by offering accessible data, a globally significant issue might be brought home.

i: Participants entered their data online, agreeing that their first names, birthplaces & years of birth be included in the resulting artwork.

ii: The calculations featured in each letter have been made using tide-gauge data (publicly available measurements of sea levels at coastal points around the world). Note that this is a creative project – these letters do not offer scientific advice. And, although readings mostly come from long-term samples, each stated figure must be rendered approximate.

Formulae used in this project can be found at: davidcass.art/behindtheletters

25.12.21 Geraldo, You were born in Floraí, Brasil in 1960.

Your closest coastline is around the national parks of Bom Jesus and Guaricana. Here, sea level has risen some 270mm across your lifetime to date, relative to land.

9.07.21 Maria, Devonport, England has seen sea rise of 126mm since your birth year of 1960.

25.06.21 Michele, Your birthplace of Washington DC, USA has witnessed 209mm of sea level rise since your year of birth, 1960.

23.06.21 Danette, As a result of glacial rebound, sea level in Gothenburg, Sweden has decreased by 63mm (relative to land) since your birth there in 1960.

Above: Four letters to participants born in 1960, illustrating the diversity of sea level changes around the world. Sea level near Geraldo’s birthplace has climbed some 270mm during his lifetime; while in Danette’s letter, glacial rebound (the bouncing back of land as a result of ancient ice loss) outpaces the rise in sea level, giving us a negative reading. Here, the sea is still rising, but the land is, too.

This exhibition book itself is a key part of the project. Many artwork photographs, for example, go beyond simple documentation: paintings are set against textures of industrial steel doors in metalworks and factories or placed upon the upturned hulls of abandoned fibreglass boats, found along the shoreline, hinting at issues of pollution and over-consumption. The book’s texts have been placed to suggest a journey, from the Outer Hebrides (the location of my previous exhibition at Taigh Chearsabhagh) to Venice. Both low-lying archipelagos are at risk, as warming water rises at pace.

Last month’s IPCC report describes a ‘brief and rapidly closing’ window for action, and UN secretary-general António Guterres has stated that ‘delay is death.’

Despair creeps into so much of the climate narrative. But despair focusses us on the endgame. Won’t that thinking make it more likely that our worst fears will come to pass? That the plethoric issues our planet faces will, combined, prove too much to surmount? This project is a quiet offering of hope, a creative model devised to encourage dialogue.

In a world where every fraction of a degree of warming counts, the coming together of many individual actions will make a difference, no matter how insignificant they may seem. Like the assembly of this show, it is the parts that make the whole.

David Cass • Athens, April 2022

Exhibition

On two walls, two oceans...

Kate Reeve-Edwards

One, a rippling anthology of 600 letters, cresting on the breeze from an open door.

The other, a swell of 365 different seas, sounds, gulfs, bays and channels, painted onto repurposed vintage tins.

Both pieces hold a shared narrative: a love letter to our oceans, a plea to respond to rising sea levels.

Both walls are created from a plethora of minute, individual narratives. Each letter contains a story of sea-rise mapped across the participants’ lifetimes. Each painting contains a different body of water, where the horizon line, time of day, and weather conditions vary in every unique view.

Both forms are containers. The tins, receptacles for past objects and vessels for new painted histories. The letters, capsules of time and tidelines, likewise are jeroboams of potential action and activism.

The large and the minute, the collective and the individual. These two states at once make the issue of rising sea levels a global and intimate problem.

David Cass’s prior work has been building up, like an oncoming swell, to this exhibition. The artist first became

captivated by the flux of water in Florence, where he travelled on a Royal Scottish Academy Scholarship. He noticed the clockwork rhythm of the autumnal arriving of rain, which frequently bloated the Arno with the possibility of flood.

The 1966 Florence flood marked the city forevermore with traces of disaster: the deluge is etched into the city’s foundations in the form of plaques denoting water levels above head height, and aqueous tidelines have left, in hidden stone places, traces of an oily residue. The Florence flood became, for Cass, a tool to explore contemporary episodes of flooding: it became a symbol of warning.

His research in Florence naturally took him to Venice, where flood-lines also exist in the form of plaques and the green algae which recounts the levels the waters rest at today. As the city sinks, the buildings, once built in harmony with the levels of the lagoon, have been adapted. Doors which once led directly out to the canals have been cropped or bricked up, their inhabitants moved either up or out.

Venice has visual warnings of oncoming flood etched into its architecture. Linear Kate Reeve-Edwards marks of oncoming sea-rise imprint themselves on the city as an admonition.

Art writer and author • Author of David Mankin: For Cass, Venice is a fitting place to present Remembering in Paint (Sansom & Company) and an exhibition concerned with water.

Painting Abstract Landscapes (Therising Crowood Press)

Read the full text in the exhibition book available via: davidcass.art/buying

More in the exhibition book, available via: davidcass.art/buying

Climate Context

In short, anthropogenic climate warming began in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. From 1880, the Earth’s average surface temperature has risen year on year. It’s hard to believe, but the islands of Venice were a powerhouse of industrial activity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with various mills, a tobacco plant, match manufacturers, steelworks and cement factories (the latter two responsible for significant CO2 emissions).

Venice was ideally located, a port city with shipyards and railway access, making it then one of Italy’s most productive and industrialised centres, in stark contrast to its architectural beauty and precious art collections. Repercussions were quickly made clear, within the urban framework of the city, and of course, the lagoon itself. Poorly managed and polluted, over

several decades the lagoon became a dumping ground, its fragile ecosystem severely damaged, alongside that of its salt-marsh neighbour – which is today under renewed threat as a result of the new damns surrounding the city, filtering out vital nutrients, limiting the marsh’s ability to absorb carbon and contribute to the fight against climate change.

The rise in global average temperature kickstarted by the Industrial Revolution is accelerating, as our reliance on fossil fuels soars. As the atmosphere heats, so too do our seas. Through a process known as thermal expansion, one symptom of the climate crisis is the warming – and rising – of seawater. By now, we’re almost all aware of this phenomenon. But the rate of rise differs drastically from place to place.

This is the principal focus of Where Once the Waters.

Among the artworks in the exhibition a single matchbox can be found, a seascape cradled within, its cover illustrating the Baschiera e Saffa match factory in the mid-1890s (coincidentally, the same time that the Venice Biennale was founded) in the St. Giobbe area, its chimneys and that of its neighbours billowing smoke. The activities which led to great opportunity in that period of the city’s history, in so many industrialised cities around the world, and which carries forward into our lives today, has led to climate breakdown.

In one century, we have fast-forwarded through warming which should have taken thousands of years. We’ve nearly doubled the volume of carbon in our atmosphere, increased methane levels two and a half times over, pushed up sea levels and killed off over half our coral reefs. As put by author Robert Macfarlane, ‘we burn Carboniferous-era fossil fuels to melt Pleistocene-era ice to determine Anthropocene future climates.’

As the land subsides in Venice, locked-in sea rise accelerates.

A heavy sky hangs over Venice and its lagoon.

December 31st Oil on tin • wooden piece • matchbox

The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing; and the salt seaweed Clings to the marble of her palaces.

— Excerpt from Samuel Roger’s Venice (1822)

Unlike the many cities situated for accessibility by river or harbour, Venice was planted in a lagoon for protection, as a sort of moat to keep enemies away.

Bride of the Adriatic as she was fashioned, Venice over centuries attracted artists who sought to dissolve the picture plane in favour of conveying the effects of water, always in movement and yet constantly there, resplendent with colour and light.

Now, if we look closely, certain of those centuries-old paintings have come to signal danger. Water levels at the time of Bellotto’s The Campo di SS Giovanni e Paolo (Washington, 1764) clearly never rose to those we see now, which cause anxiety about the integrity of the campo itself (flooded in November 2019).

Giorgione (d. 1510) made a painting of a figure (since lost) standing next to a pool of water, the surface of which captured the back view, with a mirror on one side and a mirroring piece of armour on the other. It is easy to suppose that the experience of living in Venice helped to suggest the possibility of immersing the viewer in the pictorial space by including reflective surfaces, water supplemented by the mirrors that, like glass production, were distinctive Venetian industries.

The benign lagoon itself figures prominently in an early depiction of daily life, Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies (early 1490s), with its detailed background view of archers on boats hunting cormorants (now in the Getty Museum; the lower part is in the Museo Correr).

The still waters reflect the bright colours of their garments, almost anticipating Impressionism. In Giovanni Bellini’s Sacred Allegory (Uffizi, c. 1490–1500) the holy figures are arranged on a stone terrace amidst a landscape divided into parts by water. The melded browns and blues of the water surface in the middle ground help harmonise the contrasting sections of this highly innovative painting.

The impetuous brush of Tintoretto inaugurated the task of rendering waves that echoed the fury of storm clouds, as in his Christ at the Sea of Galilee (Washington, c. 1580). The dynamical relationship between sea and sky captivated not only Canaletto but after him Turner, Whistler, and Monet, all of whom favoured Venetian views of sky, sea, and mist, usually more tranquil seas than Tintoretto’s whitecaps. The Scotsman James McBey is known to have worked on etching plates while riding a gondola a

Previous spread Venice during extreme acqua alta in November 1966

century ago, both by day and at night by candlelight, trying to capture delicate and ephemeral effects of light reflected off water and through brume.

More recently, in a collateral event of the Venice Biennale in 2011, a slithering column of steam rose up into the dome in Anish Kapoor’s installation in San Giorgio Maggiore, Ascension. Evanescent and glowing vaporised water echoed in its pure whiteness Palladio’s robust plaster walls, outside of which mist often hovers over the lagoon. Water is mutable; and as Venice has vividly shown the world during recent damaging acque alte, even its beneficence is mutable.

David Cass’s Where Once the Waters encourages us to expand from diminutive objects permeated with a sense of the past to potentially catastrophic future outcomes. The past is not utterly behind us, nor is the future merely its unexceptional extension. His installation makes palpable the quantity of data points required to understand a truly global and cumulative threat, pressing both in its ubiquity and in its pace. As with the infinitude of tesserae in the mosaics so characteristic of Venice, the combination

confronts us and demands our attention as a whole. The sea, his objects suggest, variously paint our shores, the tides rising and encroaching on a vast, historical and yet alarmingly accelerating time scale.

Each antique tin signifies the interface between a comforting sense of continuity and a very discomforting sense of potentially catastrophic change.

The presence of the lagoon in Venice has, after thirteen hundred years, switched from peaceful to foreboding. And around the globe, similarly, the world oceans are newly threatening. Each tin and each letter in Where Once the Waters invites us to imagine future floods and erosion that scientists are currently struggling to ameliorate or avoid. The exhibition makes concrete our need for purposefulness, our need to protect a delicate symbiosis with the planet.

Patricia Emison Author, art historian and professor of Art & Art History at the University of New Hampshire, USA • Titles include The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (Cambridge University Press), Leonardo (Phaidon Colour Library) and Art and its Observers (Vernon Press)

Studio Arranging tins in the studio pre-exhibition

Bio

Related

David Cass (b. 1988, Edinburgh) is an artist best known for his environmentally themed projects using found and recycled materials. His subject over the last decade has been the sea, and in recent years, the issue of rising sea levels.

Points of Return Collaborative project Umbrella Arts, Concord, USA

Cass (nato nel 1988, Edimburgo) è un artista conosciuto soprattutto per i suoi progetti a tema ambientale che utilizzano materiali ritrovati e riciclati. Il suo soggetto principale nell’ultimo decennio è stato il mare e, più recentemente, la questione dell’innalzamento del suo livello.

2022

2022 –2023

I am Water: New York Billboard Campaign featuring Sea Level Reading: Rhea, New York EcoArtSpace + Our Humanity Matters New York, USA Summer Exhibition featuring Sea Level Reading: Claire, Boston and Thames Letters Royal Academy, England 2022

The Sea from Here Curatorial project 2021

COP26 Multimedia support to four creative projects Locations around Glasgow, Scotland 2021

Rising Horizon / Horizon Rising Solo exhibitions The Scottish Gallery & Taigh Chearsabhagh Edinburgh & North Uist, Scotland 2019 & 2020

As Coastline is to Ocean Two person exhibition An Talla Solais, Ullapool, Scotland 2019

Pełàda Solo exhibition The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland 2017

Perimetri Perduti Solo exhibition The British Institute of Florence, Italy 2016

Rome Media Art Festival Collaborative exhibition contribution MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy 2016

Quest’Arno! Quest’Arno!

Two person exhibition SACI, Florence, Italy 2015

Till it’s Gone Collaborative exhibition contribution Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey 2015

Where Once the Waters is a creative project aimed at raising awareness – it does not offer scientific guidance.

Photography & book design by David Cass 2022 Exhibition identity (custom title & header fonts) by Paula Del Mas No part of this book may be copied or downloaded

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www.davidcass.art info@davidcass.art @davidcass.art @david_cass

Exhibition book available via: davidcass.art/buying

“Always, and unremittingly, the sea is now political. It is not just part of our society but of our bodies. It has a voice that must be heard as we seek alternatives to the unconstrained violence of growth-based economics. Every way in which we now threaten the sea’s delicate balance will haunt our species and all others for millennia. Damage the ocean, this manifesto says, and we destroy ourselves. There is no better distillation of these messages and their aesthetic power than the art of David Cass.

The urgency of his message has prompted rich interweaving of visual and textual components to generate visions that no one medium could communicate alone. This is not a story about the ocean out there…”

— David Gange