A free digital guide will be provided with each booking. Artefacts produced by the artists are also available to order in printed form.

Tidings is being released as a short series of publications through Interval Editions. Working with designer, art director, and critical practitioner, Liam Morrow to produce a range of printed material, released in ‘tides’ of discrete but interconnected works, which aim to invoke the comings and goings of the river and allow the audience to navigate their own route through it. With the release of each ‘tide’ the audience is asked to renegotiate their engagement and their understanding, using the material presented as a way to inhabit Tidings as an ongoing experiential artwork.

The team behind Tidings are: Daniel Benson, photographer.

Matthew Crowley, working-class writer, researcher, creative practitioner and educator.

Liam Morrow, designer and critical practitioner.

Daniel, Matthew, and Liam work collaboratively to explore space, memory, and materiality, questioning how experience might be recorded, represented and shared, and how we might consciously inhabit, and make apparent, histories that overlap, ebb, and flow through space as practiced place.

Tidings is a heterodox study of the Thames Estuary region that has developed over an nine-year period. The project connects spaces along the river, employing layers of interpretative methods which range from evidence-based historic record to experimental literature, representational photography to abstract imagery in order to illustrate a convergence of physical and psychological landscapes. The illegibility of the terrain emerges, where remnants of contested and contradictory histories are strewn over an uncertain future. Vivid, yet fragmentary, Tidings asks its audience to participate in a pluralist perception of space, to step into a region, both real and imaginary, where river becomes sea and time and place flow both ways.

The practice of walking as an active research method has remained central to the project, which exists as an ongoing and active engagement with the ever-shifting landscapes of the estuary. Since beginning the work in 2016 Daniel and Matthew have explored sites at Tilbury, Swanscombe, Hoo Peninsula, and Canvey Island, among many others along the North and South banks of the Thames. A confounding place emerges, one moment polluted and terrifying, another calm and sublime. As a walk settles into its metronomic pace, the landscape finds some sort of balance, sometimes in the baffling complexity of commerce, other times in pure isolation. The Thames running through it all, constant and alluring, an ouroboros, inviting us to remember, urging us to forget through continual sweeping tides that start anew each day.

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Image: Daniel Benson