We’re excited to be launching ‘Grit’, a new film by artist Phil Coy on 7 March in Chatham.
Emerging from the increasingly murky depths of the sea, ‘Grit’ draws on the little-known phenomena of ‘coastal darkening’, a steady decline in water clarity and a literal darkening of waters around the world’s coastlines over the last century, and the peculiar shifting landscape of the aggregates industry, where materials formed over millennia, on a gradual passage to the bottom of the ocean, are dredged up and deposited back onto land to rise back up to form the buildings and architecture that surround us.
It captures the imperfections of human vision, the degenerating rods and cones of the human eye, the darkening coasts of a world made turbid by human activities, a diseased human vision potentially cured by the genetic propensity that the retina of a Zebrafish have to regenerate.
Screening for the first time, the film will be shown alongside Phil Coy and Jonny Graham’s ‘Sound Mirror’ (1999) and followed by a conversation between Phil and William Fowler, writer and Curator of Artists’ Moving Image at the BFI.
Join us for the launch at 18:30 on Thursday 7 March 2024 at A+E Lab in The Historic Dockyard Chatham.
Grit was commissioned by Cement Fields as part of Estuary 2021 and has been kindly supported by Arts Council England, the University of Hull, Moorfields Eye Hospital, and The Historic Dockyard Chatham.