Somewhere Becoming Sea: Hull 2017 UK City of Culture

This international exhibition (5 April – 17 June 2017) at the Humber Street Gallery was included as part of the 'Roots and Routes' season of Hull 2017, City of Culture events staged in the city. The exhibition was curated by Steven Bode and included new film and photography commissions and artworks responding to the ecological, cultural and political history of the Humber, Nordic and North Sea region. It included contributions from Lavinia Greenlaw, Simon Faithful, Alec Finlay, Esther Johnson, Guy Moreton, Cecilia Stenbom, and Nina Sverdvik.

Moreton was commissioned through the artists' film and video curatorial agency Film and Video Umbrella and Hull UK City of Culture to research and develop his photographic practice specifically around the coastal landscape of the river Humber. This practice-as-research further developed his interest in our understanding of landscape framed through the methodology of cultural geography, memory, archive and place. In particular, the resulting single large scale artefact created for the public exhibition 'Somewhere Becoming Sea' sought to present a highly rendered and detailed image made using a large format film camera, depicting the almost invisible slowly eroding tidal spit 'Spurn Head' (or 'Spurn Point') on the Humber Estuary at low tide. The convergence of time in this strangely melancholic, liminal and romantic tidal landscape portrayed in the artwork 'Spurn Point' can be seen as an early modern protagonist of 'slow movement', both through the experience of Bergson's 'la durée', and lyrically manifested in music through the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' (1872 – 1958) walks along the shingle spit and recorded in his 1926 Six Studies in English Folk Song, set for cello and piano in the slow 'walking pace' second movement Andante Sostenuto 'Spurn Point'.