November 2024 Newsletter: Vital Signs: Another World is Possible Exhibition at Science Gallery Part 1

Mary Zagoritou Gallery visited VITAL SIGNS: another world is possible at Science Gallery London and shot exclusive photos of this season exhibition to present to our audience.

The exhibition is attempting to give insights to a number of vital questions such as:

What do you consider to be vital to your survival? The air you breathe? The water you drink? The earth that feeds you?

The health of our planet is essential for the survival of all living things, including you. To thrive, we need to build stronger alliances with each other, and with all other species.

Science Gallery London’s new exhibition, Vital Signs: Another world is possible brings together artists, designers and researchers to explore these relationships and how the health of the natural world - from our waterways to our atmosphere and the ocean floor - is intimately connected to our own health and wellbeing.

Revealing unique perspectives on our surrounding environments through creative, sensory works and multiple voices, this exhibition reinforces the fact that humans are fundamentally a part of nature rather than apart from it.

Vital Signs shares the ways people are shaping liveable and hopeful futures, here in London and around the world.  It confronts environmental injustices and asks us to consider: what changes could we make if we understand that the planet’s health is an extension of our own?

Mary Zagoritou Gallery will present in November's Newsletter a part of the exhibition, an interesting insight commissioned in collaboration with King's College London Libraries and Collections, presented in the room named I Am The Thames and The Thames is Me.

In this room one can see an installation of eight 'river guardians' made of wooden stands. These are made by reclaimed clay sewage pipes and powdered bio-waste from London sewage, the latter produced in industrial waste incinerator. All are then worked together, turned into clay and glazed. The fabric has been dyed using indigo, mud and clay with objects and plants from the Thames mixed with the artist urine- a widely used historical method to dye fabric.

Printed details include archivalimagery related to 1858 London's historical cholera epidemic.

This new commission explores the connections between human waste and the River Thames. Printed details on the installation draw on civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s 19th Century designs for a new London sewer system, scientific data gathered by King's College London researchers on Eschericia coll bacteria, alongside myths of fantastical creatures believed to populate the sewers. Chong Kwan’s research explored histories of river health in crisis; from the Great Stink of 1858, when untreated human waste overwhelmed the capital, to the cholera epidemics which claimed thousands of lives across the city and contemporary pollution.

Eight ‘river guardians’ are hand-crafted, incorporating materials drawn from the Thames and London sewage waste. Together they symbolise protection and stewardship, health inequalities in the capital and collective action. 

Sites of pollution and waste management along the River Thames are shown in the calico wall hanging, made using natural dyes. The printed and collaged fantastical fabric map of the River Thames features sewers, mythical creatures and historical and contemporary testimonies of pollution, finished with hand-painted bio-waste.

The title refers to a Māori saying associated with the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (New Zealand), which has been granted legal personhood. 

The work calls attention to the management of the waste that we ourselves create, and its impact on the health of the river that sustains us and the city in which we live.

Sites of pollution and waste management along the River Thames are shown in a calico wall hanging, made using natural dyes. A printed and collaged fantastical fabric map of the River Thames features sewers, mythical creatures and historical and contemporary testimonies of pollution, finished with hand-painted bio- waste.

Photos and Photo Collage by Mary Zagoritou 16/01/2025.

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