Art exhibition opening at WASPs Granton Station

An exhibition by two artists at Granton Station this month will explore the power of the oceans.

Alison Grant will exhibit her work in We Are Ocean at the newest of art spaces in the city, alongside fellow artist Tokes Sharif.

In Alison’s art, there are reflections and echoes of land and sea, winter and spring, the human and non-human, of the material earth on which we live and the cultural world in which we dwell.

Algal inks and seaweed and shells, the gifts gathered on beachcombing expeditions, proliferate, never seen by Grant as mere passive materials, but as endowed with the same shaping power of the ocean itself.

Tokes Sharif also turns to the oceans for inspiration. His pots follow the forms of frond and stipe and calcareous growth until, like amphorae salvaged from ancient shipwrecks, they seem barnacled over by time, as though they already anticipate their own sea-change.

Sharif incorporates oystershells directly into his work and experiments with seaweed ash glazes.

He uses restricted firing techniques which, while they relinquish a degree of control over the finish and frustrate efforts at flawless execution, do allow the fullest possible expression to the mineral content of the clay.

His work is invitingly tactile, with a deeply satisfying heft and volume, and hugely desirable, though their particularity resists the commodification of that desire: Sharif’s pots are a quiet revolt against ideal form.

Grant’s oysters are not representations of oysters, but oysters representing. Sharif’s pots are not acheiropoieta, not made by human hands, but they are not made only by human hands.

In We Are Ocean, Grant and Sharif are feeling their way towards a way of working which might also suggest a way of living in these environmentally destitute times, towards a poetics of reciprocity. 

16 SEPTEMBER – 4 OCTOBER,  THE WAITING ROOM GALLERY

Wasps Granton Station, Edinburgh, EH5 1FU​