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In Tilda Swims the Channel, Chudamani Clowes reimagines the sea – that vast threshold between safety and uncertainty. Through the act of passage across the sea she reflects on migration, ecological precarity and the enduring legacies of empire. Like coral – millions of years old and continuously propagating through the currents – people too have always moved in search of safety and sustenance. Today these movements are charged with a new urgency; political instability, economic inequalities and the intensifying crisis of climate change. Working with layered translucent materials Clowes’s practice confronts these realities directly, holding in tension the great beauty of the seas as a source of hope and its simultaneous role as a site of loss for the many migrants that embark on a perilous journey.
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INSTALLATION VIEWS
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Working across painting, collage, printmaking and sculpture Clowes assembles layered fragile surfaces that echo the instability and resilience of a migratory life. Tissue paper, rice paper, printed materials are torn, reassembled and embedded forming complex topographies that shimmer like the ocean’s surface and seduces like the ocean depths. These mixed media compositions evoke the turbulence of the seas as both a site of passage and peril. Her titles inspired by Japanese haikus extend this poetic sensibility by distilling the vast emotions into evocative titles that offers a moment of reflection amidst chaos. Through these tactile and sedimented processes Clowes makes visible what is often submerged – layered histories of migration, environmental degradation and colonial continuities – rippling beneath the waves of our shared seas.
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Migration emerges in Clowes’s imagination not only as a human story but also an ecological one–of corals drifting across oceans, of sacks of rice travelling in cargo ships, of habitats destroyed in the wake of a voracious global appetite. This body of work acknowledges these layered crossings, situating them within the larger structures of empire, economy and climate crisis that continue to shape who moves, who must move and who is denied entry.
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Tilda Swims The Channel: Chudamani Clowes
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