Finissage Sunday 12 July
11-2pm Brunch
Event: Saturday 27 June 2-5pm
In Conversation 3pm
Susie Olczak, Cecilia Vilela and Catherine Dormor
Join us at Coleman Projects for a conversation between artist Susie Olczak, curator Cecilia Vilela (92 Webster Road), and artist, writer and academic Catherine Dormor, on the occasion of To Tide You Over at Coleman Projects and Adrián Balseca: The Voyage at 92 Webster Road.
Bringing together two exhibitions that consider the movement of materials, resources and histories across landscapes and geographies, the discussion will explore shared themes of circulation, extraction, infrastructure and ecological change. From the waterways and tidal systems that shape Olczak's practice to Balseca's investigations into the colonial histories of rubber and botanical exchange, the conversation will reflect on how artists use research, material processes and storytelling to reveal hidden networks that connect places, people and environments.
Set within neighbouring exhibition spaces on Webster Road, the event offers an opportunity to consider the relationship between natural and engineered systems, the legacies embedded within landscapes, and the role of contemporary art in making visible the forces that shape our world.
To Tide You Over , a solo presentation of new printmaking, sculpture and moving image by Susie Olczak. Exploring how water connects and transforms landscapes through both natural and engineered systems, the exhibition traces its movement across hidden and visible networks–from root systems and moisture bearing soils that quietly draw and redistribute moisture to infrastructures that manage flow and circulation.
Olczak's research connects Chile's Atacama Desert with London's waterways, revealing how distant sites become linked through circulation and exchange. The nearby Brunel Tunnel – a pioneering Victorian underwater passage that became as much spectacle as infrastructure – exemplifies water's dual role in shaping both practical necessity and cultural imagination, a tension that runs throughout the exhibition.
In the main gallery, Olczak's ceramic sculptures embody the physicality of their engineering, scratched and moulded into objects that speak to potential function as much as materiality and aesthetics. The works point to the contingent, improvisational processes the artist uses to investigate spatial environments. Meanwhile, moving image work in the Shed space splices together fragments of terrain, water and light to meditative effect.
In proximity to the Thames, To Tide You Over, takes the river's tidal rhythm as both subject and structure, considering how adaptation offers ways of understanding shifting landscapes – where water is both sustaining and increasingly unpredictable.
Susie Olczak is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture. Her work considers ideas of contingent making and adaption in relation to climate change.
Upcoming Saturday 27 June 2-5pm
In Conversation: Susie Olczak, Cecilia Vilela and Catherine Dormor
Coleman Project Space kindly supported by the Henocq Law Trust
Further press & biography 07930377734 I info@colemanprojects.org.uk
