Sea Garden exhibition at RAMM, Exeter, UK
November 2019 to January 2020
Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter, UK
This vibrant and intriguing contemporary art exhibition explored the female-gendered relationship with the sea and seaweed. “Sea Garden” brought together RAMM’s first South West Commission, a moving-image work by Bryony Gillard, alongside works by internationally-renowned contemporary artists.
Works included Dartmoor-based photographer Susan Derges’s recent rock pool series; film and photography by Dorothy Cross; Mikhail Karikis’s video installation “Sea Women”; and Turner Prize-nominee Lucy Skaer’s reworked nineteenth-century seaweed prints. Viewers were surprised and challenged by thoughtful and cutting-edge artwork, displayed alongside beautiful examples of pressed seaweeds from RAMM’s own collections.
Jo Crook contributed a time-based installation work to the exhibition, using real pressed seaweed specimens. There was also an extensive display of pressed seaweeds and digital lightdark marine prints, the prints available to buy, in The Cafe at RAMM. The display ran concurrently with the Sea Garden exhibition.