Liquid Landscape

A contemporary art & archive project for the Canal & River Trust

2013
CANAL & RIVER TRUST'S OFFICE, TOLL HOUSE, LITTLE VENICE

Artists: Tod Hanson & Katherine Green with poems by Jo Bell and artefacts from the Canal & River Trust’s National Collection

In 2013 Day + Gluckman were invited to curate a project for the Canal and River Trust‘s London office in Little Venice.

Artist Tod Hanson has transformed the central staircase of the Toll House with a unique wall painting. Hanson has looked specifically at the topography of the canals and locks so that the artwork itself negotiates paths through the fixtures and fittings of the building; the artist acts as engineer of an unfolding landscape, denoted through colour, form and repeated motifs. 

Katherine Green‘s contemporary photographs of canal dwellers,  a personal project she undertook charting the beguiling stories of the Hackney and Walthamstow Marshes close to her home, are shown alongside the wonderfully evocative and rich poems by 2013 Canal Laureate, Jo Bell.  Bell lives on the 67ft narrowboat ‘Tinker’, travelling around the UK where she writes her poems and contributes to the Poetry Society’s blog on Waterlines.org. The images and imagery of Green and Bell’s works highlight both the enduring passion that the canals and rivers evoke alongside the more domestic day-to-day routines with which we are all familiar.

Throughout the building the industrial and engineering heritage of the Trust is revealed through wooden patterns and forms, loaned from the Canal & River Trust’s National Collection. Used as ‘forms’ for the shaping, casting and coercing of metal and wood in boat and lock building they show the high quality of craftsmanship, often hidden to the everyday canal user. Weathered and worn they are beautiful artisan objects in their own right.

The offices are not open to the public but if you are interested in visiting please email us as we are planning some tours of the building in due course.