David Cass
On Two Walls, Two Oceans
Where Once the Waters Essay
David Cass’s prior work has been building up, like an oncoming swell, to this exhibition.
On two walls, two oceans.
One, a rippling anthology of 600 letters, cresting on the breeze from an open door. The other, a swell of 365 different seas, sounds, gulfs, bays and channels, painted onto repurposed vintage tins.
Both pieces hold a shared narrative: a love letter to our oceans, a plea to respond to rising sea levels.
Both walls are created from a plethora of minute, individual narratives. Each letter contains a story of sea rise mapped across the participants’ lifetimes. Each painting contains a different body of water, where the horizon line, time of day, and weather conditions vary in every unique view.
Both forms are containers. The tins, receptacles for past objects and vessels for new painted histories. The letters, capsules of time and tidelines, likewise are jeroboams of potential action and activism.
The large and the minute, the collective and the individual. These two states at once make the issue of rising sea levels a global and intimate problem.
David Cass’s prior work has been building up, like an oncoming swell, to this exhibition. The artist first became captivated by the flux of water in Florence, where he travelled on a Royal Scottish Academy Scholarship. He noticed the clockwork rhythm of the autumnal arriving of rain, which frequently bloated the Arno with the possibility of flood. The 1966 Florence flood marked the city forevermore with traces of disaster: the deluge is etched into the city’s foundations in the form of plaques denoting water levels above head height, and aqueous tidelines have left, in hidden stone places, traces of an oily residue. The Florence flood became, for Cass, a tool to explore contemporary episodes of flooding: it became a symbol of warning.
His research in Florence naturally took him to Venice, where flood lines also exist in the form of plaques and the green algae which recounts the levels the waters rest at today. As the city sinks, the buildings, once built in harmony with the levels of the lagoon, have been adapted. Doors which once led directly out to the canals have been cropped or bricked up, their inhabitants moved either up or out.
Venice has visual warnings of oncoming flood etched into its architecture. Linear marks of oncoming sea rise imprint themselves on the city as an admonition. For Cass, Venice is a fitting place to present an exhibition concerned with rising sea levels.
Although most of Cass’s work has been environmentally charged, he wanted this show to focus in on a specific aspect of our changing planet. Over the last three years, the artist has held discussions with several experts in the field concerning sea level rise across the last century, including Prof. Dave Reay, chair of Carbon Management at Edinburgh University, and his previous collaborator, the oceanographer John Englander. These individuals (alongside others listed at the end of this catalogue) have aided in Cass’s research, offering guidance and support.
Asking volunteers to offer up their birthplace and date of birth, conceptually tightened Cass’s idea. As many different people from around the globe took part, it offered up a worldwide view of sea rise.
The typical data we are presented with is that the global mean sea level has risen 21–24 centimetres since 1880, but this average figure doesn’t tell the whole story, far from it. Some places are experiencing a more dramatic rate of rise year-on-year than others. By mapping sea level changes across a person’s whole lifetime and attaching this rise to the place of their birth, the change feels more visceral.
Both you and the waters have grown with time.
‘Reports on the climate crisis, especially in recent weeks, can seem too catastrophic to consider’ says Cass, ‘many of us feel a sense of despondency and it’s often easier not to engage when an issue is “far off”, unrelatable, or perhaps even within the realm of science fiction. Yet when you are told the data in a way that is personal, it becomes more manageable.’
Through art, scientific data can be presented in an engaging way; it is a mobilising medium.
Installed, the letters act as a kind of kinetic wall sculpture; all the sheets overlapping to create a united, rustling organism. The letters are personalised in content and unique aesthetically; because of the varying surface, each has been adapted to engage with the ground it is typed upon. Like everything Cass creates, the letters use vintage paper: old receipts, invoices, or plain stationary, often over a century old, dating back to the time the warming began.
There is a warmth to these letters. The worn ink from the old typewriter, the physical space afforded to each neat block of text, the glowing sepia of the paper draws the viewer towards this swarm. They read one, then turn to its overlapping brother, then read another, and another until the scale of the issue is kindled inside them. Instead of a tsunamic realisation, it is a gradual swelling and churning of an internal tide that will continue to build beyond the bounds of this exhibition.
The 365 paintings which complement the wall of letters, represent 365 days. All organically interact with each other, coming together to tell this bigger story of a year at sea.
Like the letters, every piece is unique, each responding to the surface it is painted on. Horizon lines are adjusted to reveal or cover the tin’s typography; colours respond to the pigments noticeable on each surface. The painting process reacts and enhances the objects, working with them to create a new life. We can often see or guess at what the tins were originally used for, and this knowledge or pleasurable speculation of the past enriches the object’s repurposed present.
A circular ecosystem of reuse and repair is what Cass is gently encouraging. The hand-held world of the tin is regenerated: these small objects which once contained tobacco, mints, or teabags now convey new, bigger ideas. With the letters Cass alerts us to the problem; with the tins he offers us part of a solution. A way of living within a circular economy: reusing objects that appear to have ceased in their function, mending that which is broken, holding on to what we already have, rather than straining for the new.
These paintings too emphasise visually the importance of our private oceans. Whereas in the letters this ownership is laid out linguistically, in the paintings this is presented to us in a more sensual way. We can pick up, own, frame, hold, use these tins, these waters.
When we look at the 365 choices, we automatically seek out our favourites, perhaps unconsciously layering remembrances of our own oceans onto them. The art becomes personal, private, small, and quiet.
Having identified our ocean, having read how much the waters closest to our birthplace have risen, we leave the exhibition pointedly touched: the desire to protect what is ours swelling inside us.
For more information: https://davidcass.art/whereoncethewaters