Venue
APT Gallery
Starts
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Ends
Sunday, April 7, 2024
Address
Art in Perpetuity Trust Harold Wharf 6 Creekside Deptford London SE8 4SA
Location
London
Organiser
APT Gallery

Life Boat brings together artists with a shared interest in exploring precarity as a site of dynamic transition. Each takes an investigative approach to the environmental, social and historical themes evoked by the lifeboat, as a means of addressing ecological crisis, liminal landscapes, close and distant horizons, boundaries and displacement, lines of rescue, navigation and transformation.

The gallery location in Deptford, once a major departure point for maritime trade and scientific expeditions from Deptford Dockyard, resonates with the exhibition’s concept of being ‘at sea’, in the sense of negotiating the unknown. Research into local histories and ecologies informs work created for the exhibition and is further expanded upon in the accompanying events programme.

Video and mixed media works also draw on material gathered from the Arctic Ocean in the Svalbard Archipelago, The Sea of Hebrides and Long Beach Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest, to reflect on disappearing, threatened and polluted landscapes. Other fieldwork undertaken feeds into work that considers the human experience of dislocation from nature and the need for faith, hope and resilience.

Fragility and vulnerability are embodied in layered works on paper, a large suspended sculpture made from delicate compostable material and living installations incorporating transient elements that transform over the exhibition period. Etchings and spatial interventions explore the use of the natural world as human resource and land as a site of geopolitical conflict. Global data security, with its increasing reliance on satellite technology exposed to the solar storms of space weather, is questioned in a multi-screen installation.

In tackling concepts of the perilous, the vulnerable and the lost, Life Boat raises the alarm on the passive position of waiting for rescue and encourages urgent action in troubled waters.

Participating artists:
Rachael Allain, Caroline AreskogJones, Beverley Duckworth, Liz Elton, Susan Eyre, Kathleen Herbert, Kaori Homma, Anne Krinsky

Events:
Friday 5 April 3:30pm – 5:30pm
Low Tide Walk in Deptford Creek – led by Creekside Discovery Centre
Friday 5 April 5:30pm – 7:30pm Refreshments and tour of the Life Boat exhibition at APT Gallery
Tickets for Low Tide Walk – £15 for adults / £10 per child aged 8 – 17 years
More info and booking through this link
Saturday April 6 2:30pm – 4:00pm
FIELDWORK AS PRACTICE – A performance / A conversation
Free Event at APT Gallery.
More info and booking through this link.
Sunday April 7 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Homma Meridian and the Secret of Invisible Ink/Fire Etching Workshop with publication launch.
Workshop at APT Gallery.
Tickets – £15
More info and booking through this link