Opening - Friday 29th May 5.30-7pm
The title Sea Texts offers a conceptual frame through which to consider the practices of Janet Mazenier and Sarah Treadwell. In both cases, the sea operates as a field of inscription that is an unstable surface upon which memory, place, and material encounter are written and rewritten.
In Mazenier’s cold wax paintings, the sea emerges through processes of accretion, erasure, and sedimentation. Pigment is layered, scraped back, and reworked, producing surfaces that resemble tidal zones - threshold spaces where matter is continuously reconfigured. Her works read as palimpsests: gestural marks hover like half-erased scripts, suggesting that the sea itself “writes” through weather, erosion, and duration. The title Sea Texts thus resonates with her phenomenological concern for the space between - between land and water, presence and disappearance, material and memory. The sea becomes a temporal text, its surface carrying traces of atmospheric affect and lived encounter.
Treadwell’s paintings and drawings also posit the sea as a liquid accumulation of stories, hopeful projections and material uncertainty. Histories, dreams and nightmares thicken its depths and enliven the surfaces offering accounts of aquatic beginnings and future arid conditions. Treadwell’s Sea texts trace and repeat both observed inscriptions and underlying imaginary messages. Her work engages the horizon which, like the crease of a book that turns pages, in turning, cultivates the escaping narratives.
For both artists, then, the sea functions as a material and conceptual author. It inscribes through movement, light, and erosion, while the painting becomes an interface where those inscriptions are registered. Sea Texts names this reciprocal act: painting as reading, and the sea as a shifting, affective text.
Cover image: Janet Mazenier
Current page image: Sarah Treadwell
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