On Watery Borders, Borderlands, and Tania Kovats’ Head to Mouth

Ysanne Holt

doi:10.3390/arts8030104

Abstract

With a relational view of landscapes and natural environments as continuously “in process” and formed from the over-layered and interdependent connections between nature and culture, the human and the non-human, this paper considers some recent practices by artists who have worked in the largely rural border region of Northern England and Southern Scotland. Expanding from a focus on the artist Tania Kovats’ 2019 Berwick Visual Arts exhibition, Head to Mouth, and a wider frame of non-anthropocentric ecological thought in relation to the visual arts, it explores the significance of diverse creative engagements with water, here with the River Tweed, and their potential value in a current cross-border context of social and environmental challenges and concern.

Highlights

The UK border region of Northern England and Southern Scotland is sparsely populated and often perceived and experienced as marginal and remote, with associations either of peace and tranquility, or of isolation and peripherality
The contention here is that cross-border, or ‘borderland’ communities are mutually constituted through longstanding, dynamic human and non-human relations with shared material resources—such as wood, water, wool, soil, and stone
Alongside the continual movement of water flowing throughout the borderland is the conception of place, and of identities, as fluid and unfixed, not static and unchanging

Summary

Introduction

The UK border region of Northern England and Southern Scotland is sparsely populated and often perceived and experienced as marginal and remote, with associations either of peace and tranquility, or of isolation and peripherality. Alongside the continual movement of water flowing throughout the borderland is the conception of place, and of identities, as fluid and unfixed, not static and unchanging With these concepts in mind, what follows is a study of a recent body of work produced by the artist Tania Kovats related to the borders river, the Tweed, within a larger context of relational thinking about landscape and environment (Massey 1994; Wylie 2007); diverse but connected examples of environmental art, eco-art or eco-activism, and of non-anthropocentric, ecological thought within the visual arts more. This border-crossing between disciplines, practices, experience, and bodies of knowledge is significant for the specific arts practices considered below Water collections such as Rivers and All the Seas relate interestingly to artist, sculptor, and filmmaker. For Bennett, the inequality of the former tendency ‘feeds human hubris and our earth destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ and prohibits the ‘emergence of more ecological and sustainable modes of production and consumption’, which are vital for human survival (ibid)

The River Tweed as ‘Troubled Water’

Conclusions