British artist Tania Kovats has been commissioned to create a permanent artwork for Shadwell Station. Root is an extensive 12 metre long cast of a buddleia root, installed within a structural cavity extending between the ground and platform levels at the station. Root is inspired both by the physical site and the surrounding environment. and examines and our relationship with landscape and place. It extends Tania's primary focus within her work, an exploration of how we culturally mediate our landscape, and brings together two languages of form - the organic and the constructed.
Within the architecture of Shadwell Station, Tania was drawn to a disused escalator shaft running from ground to platform level, sealed from public use for many years. Her response was to the uniquely subterranean character of the cavity, even though it is physically above ground - a strange internal space within the bowels of the station.
Tania chose to investigate these remains, in a form of urban archaeology. Within the opening we see the trace imprint - a negative cast - of the buddleia root, preserved, fossil-like within the darkened shaft, as if gently uncovered from its bed. The root system extends upwards into the recess of the cave-like channel, and there is a sense of discovery as one approaches the darkened interior and its intimate landscape is revealed. Root appears to have been excavated from the site - made visible, revealed. As if within an archaeological dig, we appear to be confronted by a material record, evidence of what once existed but was hidden, which is now preserved and displayed. It appears as if a cavity has been created around a root that has been removed, leaving only the trace of its presence, an absent present.
Within the urban landscape around the DLR network there is an ecosystem particular to the railway. Responding to the tenacity of the buddleia and wildflowers, found all around the area, Tania sees their presence as remarkable proof of adversity and survival within a changing landscape. The extensive root system of the plant, which allows it to prosper in often-inhospitable conditions, becomes a physical symbol of survival, an image of connections, permanency, trace and history.
Root alludes to the DLR as an important network through the city; a system of connectivity, which draws cities and communities together. But it is also a reminder of the strength of roots, lying beneath the surface, which form an individual, and shape a community and locality.
Much of Tania's previous work has been an exploration of landscape and how it is culturally mediated. Tania's interest in archaeology lies in how its many processes contribute to our ever-evolving understanding of landscape and place, the interaction between material culture and human behaviour. Her most recent project, The Museum of the White Horse, has been developed while Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology at Oxford University, and takes the form of a mobile landscape museum housed in a converted horsebox. It is Tania's personal and poetic response to the archaeological interpretation of the Uffington White Horse, an ancient monument carved into the chalk downland in southwest Oxfordshire. Its contents include a collection of archaeological, aesthetic and vernacular objects and artifacts.
Tania comments: 'The activities of artists can be seen as a vast, uncoordinated and chaotic research programme looking at what we are and how we know what we are.'
