Intertidal, In-Conversation with David Cotterrell

Last Saturday I sat down with artist David Cotterrell at Plymouth’s Tinside Lido to mark the close of his artwork Intertidal. From where we sat we could look straight out across Plymouth Sound, so the subject of our conversation was right there in front of us. As we talked, the tide out in the Sound reached low water and turned.

Intertidal ran until 19 October. It consisted of four Ford Fiestas re-engineered to fill and empty with the live tide, parked in car parks, on a farm and in a school, well away from the water’s edge.

It’s a simple idea, and like so much of David’s work, its simplicity is what makes it powerful. People stop, look and wait for the water to move. In that pause there’s room for some quite profound individual thinking about where we live, our connection to water, what water is in our global situation. And around the cars there has been a lovely collective connection too: Tide Cafés, workshops, making and singing, with people sharing their own stories of the tide, of thier lives.

My thanks to David for his generosity in conversation. He was open about the ambition, the constraints and the collaborators who shaped the work, and he gave the room plenty to take away. Thank you too to Plymouth Culture for inviting me to host this closing conversation for Sea for Yourself: Tide Together, and for having me as an advisor to the project too. It has been a real pleasure to see this programme take shape, and to see it keep asking what comes after the first encounter with an artwork.

You can find out more about the project here: https://lnkd.in/e85xswUp

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