Alaria: Bodies of Water

28 Apr-24 May 2025

PV 1 May 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

The Gerald Moore Gallery is pleased to present Alaria: Bodies of Water, an exhibition that brings together new work by Eiko Soga, Esther Teichmann, and Miriam Austin, each offering sensual and imaginative engagements with landscapes shaped by water: island, swamp, and fen. The succession of seasons, the growth of a foetus, the skin of an eel, the overhang of a branch, and the play of light on water – these are some of the gestures that bind the artworks together and might also tempt us away from the destructive binaries of human/nonhuman, natural/artificial.

The private view will be on Thursday 1st May from 6 to 8pm and the exhibition runs from 28th April to 24th May 2025.

The works in Alaria: Bodies of Water lead us into a brackish entanglement with the more-than-human and the hyper-natural. The title of the show refers to the genus of kelp that includes Alaria esculenta, widely eaten and also known as Atlantic Wakame, Badderlocks, or Láracha. Food, wetlands and bodies combine in sculpture, installation, photography and video by three artists concerned with the lived experience of the landscape, the body as a site of knowledge production. A concern with narrative leads us to reflect on the imaginative space of nature: how this can be a place of resistance in a time of extractive industry and the politics of exclusion – how listening, looking, tasting and feeling create kinship relations that trouble the human/nonhuman binary.

These artworks are grounded in the lived and embodied experience of specific environments, from the swamps of the Black Forest in Germany where Teichmann grew up, to the island of Hokkaido, Japan, where Soga has worked since 2016 in dialogue with indigenous Ainu elders, to the course of the River Great Ouse, which runs through the drained wetlands of Eastern England, site of Austin’s recent research and home to generations of her family.

Bios:

Esther Teichmann's practice moves across still and moving image, textiles and painting, creating alternate worlds, which blur autobiography and fiction. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. Our relationship to the maternal, home and female pleasure are themes which are returned to through a layering of voices and visual approaches.  Within these works of speculative fiction, bodies are indivisible from landscape – caves as mothers, water as mothers, beds as lovers, mouths as homes, seashells as orifices, sisters at every turn.  The work is haunted by night dreams and daydreams, of drowning and sleeping. Thinking about our bodies as sites of knowledge production, Teichmann reimagines space and encounters through feminist subjectivity, exploring the relationship between fiction, myth and lived experience.

Solo museum shows include Heavy the Sea, Transformer Station, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA and Mondschwimmen, Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim, Germany. Collaborations include Phantasie Fotostudio with Monster Chetwynd at John Hansard Gallery, the co-curation and editing of the exhibition and book, Staging Disorder, with artist Christopher Stewart with whom she also created the Wellcome Trust funded film and research project, Constellations. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Esther is represented by Flowers Gallery. Teichmann received an MA and PhD from the Royal College of Art (RCA) and is Head of Programme of the Master of Research at the RCA.

Eiko Soga is a UK-based Japanese artist, working with moving images, photography, poetry, and installation. Through her interdisciplinary projects, she explores the relationship between emotional and natural landscapes within the more-than-human world. She completed her practice-led PhD, titled ‘Felt Knowledge: Ecologising Art and Samani Ainu Cooking’ at The Ruskin School of Art in Oxford in 2023. 

Soga has been showing her art works internationally in exhibitions including Pitt Rivers Museum and Modern Art Oxford in Oxford, the Ethnographic Museum in Switzerland, the Ichihara Art Museum in Japan, and IKON Gallery in Birmingham. She is currently a Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow in Fine Art at University of Oxford.

Miriam Austin is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, video and performance, exploring relationships between ritual, myth, ecological fragility and the politics of the body. Her current research follows rivers that run through landscapes affected in different ways by climate change, extractive industry and ecological degradation, seeking to weave narratives through these sites that draw attention to the psychic and material entanglements that shape our experience of threatened environments.

Austin graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture in 2012 and is currently studying on the PhD programme at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Over recent years she has shown work at venues including Modern Art Oxford; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK; Camden Art Centre, London; The Show Room, London; The ICA, London; Jupiter Woods, London; Gossamer Fog, London; Alma Zevi Gallery, Venice, Italy and Cripta 747, Turin, Italy. 

The exhibition is open to the public on Saturdays from 10am to 4pm and by appointment. 

To make an appointment, please email [email protected] or call 02088570448.