Roni Horn: Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)

Roni Horn’s reputation as an artist of international stature has been obscured in London by the singular lack of opportunity for audiences to see her work. Acknowledged as one of the most complex and intelligent artists working today, Horn practises in a number of different media; installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and books. Her subjects are concerned as much with landscape and portraiture as with conceptual issues and abstraction. Horn has said that she does not see these as separate approaches or opposite poles.
 
Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) is an installation of photographs of the River Thames in which the photographs are interwoven with text in the form of footnotes to convey ideas Horn’s had about the river. Water is an enduring motif in Horn’s work, whether it be the “palpable nature” of Iceland’s pools and hot springs,  or the seascapes of the Arctic Ocean: “Going into water is going into yourself. Water is a mirror. When you see your reflection in water, do you recognise the water in you?”.
 
An important aspect of Horn’s work is the viewer’s physical relationship to the exhibition as they move through it. Roni Horn’s considered installation in the new space of Timothy Taylor Gallery, with its combination of high ceilings and domestic scale, encourages the viewer to experience the subtleties and nuances of each image from the series.
 
Describing Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) herself, Horn said: “I began writing the notes for Still Water a year before I started photographing the Thames....Much of it was written as reverie, my reverie, evolving quickly into a manic, obsessive, endless flow of consciousness, and finally becoming a litany with chorus-like elements....I wrote these notes in the solitude of myself but I did so anticipating your arrival. A triangle is formed between you, me (the voice in the footnotes) and the photographs. All three elements are inextricably bound together in the act of experiencing the work.”
 
Roni Horn was born in New York City where she lives and works. She has exhibited extensively in Europe and North America.
 
Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) was exhibited in Horn’s recent retrospective at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) originated from a commission by Public Art Development Trust, London, who have produced Horn’s new book Another Water (The River Thames, for Example), published by Scalo. Coincidentally, Horn also has a new book on her work being launched in May, Roni Horn published by Phaidon Press.