Has the River Thames flooded? A beach hut has floated onto the River Terrace of Somerset House and the adjacent windows of New Wing are filled up with blue water? It’s a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Trust’s Nepture Coastline campaign to look after England and North Ireland’s coastline, appropriately being held at Somerset House given its strong historic links with the Navy and the sea.
The exhibition title “One and All” is a reference to one of John Betjeman’s poems of that title about the many threats to the coast and also introduces London to “Trust New Art”, the National Trust’s contemporary arts programme, a three year programme of contemporary art taking place in selected National Trust properties in partnership with the Arts Council to involve and engage new audiences in the Trust’s work.
These un-refurbished rooms on the River Terrace at Somerset House have to be imagined as a sandy beach with a wooden walkway across taking the visitor on a “voyage through sight sound and sea”, with video, poetry and sound by the three artists Tania Kovats, Martyn Ware and Owen Sheers working with film producer Benjamin Wigley and linked to the interactive website at www.nationaltrust.org.uk/oneandall, For this exhibition, Kovats has also installed a bronze bell, mysteriously cast at the autumn equinox on Porthcurno beach in Cornwall by the foundry Ore + Ingot, and which is rung throughout the exhibition at the high tide of the River Thames while surrounded by the names of harbours and headlands around the British coast.
Somerset House, as the former home of the Navy Board, was the base from which the Navy organised its activities across the seas; now appropriately it has a celebration of the sea here in the old spaces which the Navy Board occupied for many years.
