Susan Collins

Collins works with what she calls ‘analogue variables,’ such as ‘people, weather, tides, or simply time,’ building frameworks that rely on them for the work to play out and, hopefully, surprise. For two decades she has placed networked cameras in remote and coastal locations, their images accruing pixel by pixel in real time, ‘like writing on a page.’ Rising Tides was commissioned for the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024: cameras on floating piers in Bangkok and London each completed an image over just over six hours, loosely following the tides of both rivers. This animated slideshow gathers the London views of the Thames, looking towards Tower Bridge and the Shard, as the camera rises and falls with water levels that shift by up to seven metres, revealing ‘the embedded choreography of the tide itself.’ Offshore, a new live work, looks out from the seafront at Redcar, in the industrial North-East of England, over an offshore wind farm and a Mesolithic petrified forest, between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, that very occasionally emerges when storms and high tides strip away the sand. Once part of Doggerland, the landmass that connected Britain to mainland Europe, it now appears in an image that looks still but is always quietly changing.