THE SEA, THE GHOST AND THE KITE MAKER
Claire Allerton, 2025
The Norfolk coastline is in constant transformation. Shaped by the elements, the soft beaches, cliffs and dunes suffer ceaseless attrition. It is an ongoing metamorphosis that reflects a passage of time so lengthy that it is difficult to comprehend in terms of a human lifespan. Marilou Chagnaud’s multidisciplinary project The Sea, the Ghost & the Kite Maker responds to the fragile and dynamic processes of this coastal change. Here, in this exhibition, the artist breathes vision into both the geological alteration, and the deeply human stories embedded within the shifting landscape.
During Chagnaud’s 12-month Fellowship with East Gallery, she was inspired to undertake repeated coastal walks between Sheringham and Sea Palling, staying at Weybourne beach, and having conversations with local residents and environmental groups. Chagnaud’s practice blends careful observation, community engagement, and material experimentation. Her beach walks were not deliberately scientific but followed a natural pattern of human movement, and she was able to bear-witness to a coastline in flux; cliffs crumbling under the rain and tides, dunes disappearing with battering winds, and homes lost to storms. Her journeys demonstrated the sensory reality of living on the edge of turbulent water, and the significant tension between permanence and impermanence.
The exhibition reflects these layered experiences through a specific visual and sensory language. Chagnaud distils the narrative of erosion into a minimalistic code of lines, textures and sounds.The sculpture at the heart of the exhibition, composed of pleated organza silk, hangs with a delicate transparency. Its folded surfaces embody a concept of the “ghost”: those traces of absence, loss, and vanished stories that haunt the landscape. ‘Folds’, Chagnaud comments, ‘are a fundamental element of nature’s design’. In geology a ‘fold’ refers to the slow deformation of rocks, but folds are also present in fossils, plant and animal morphology, roots and geological strata.Folds, or lines in the landscape also emerge through human paths, worn into the land by repeated movement over time.
On the coast, sound is an assertive companion to the visual elements. On one trip to Weybourne, Chagnaud invited Gaia Blandina (interdisciplinary sound artist and cellist) and Desmond Clarke (composer, visual artist and oboist) to stay with her. The trio collaborated on a unique soundscape that channels the voice of the coast as they found it in April this year. Their composition, that you can experience in the gallery or during a live performance at the opening and closing of the exhibition, captures both the natural environment and experimental sounds produced using found beach objects such as driftwood, stones, crab shells, whelk eggs, and dried seaweed. The resulting auditory experience fills the space, pulling your attention away from a single sense, as it does at the beach, and recreating the living environment.
Foregrounding the artist’s performative dimension of practice, The Sea, the Ghost & the Kite Maker features some of the screen-printed paper kites used on Weybourne beach during the recordings. Kites embody transience and connection, recreating interactions between people, landscape, and the invisible dynamics of wind and weather. As Nakamura Yoshio notes in Cerfs-volants du Japon (2021), ‘kites become devices for perceiving the landscape... They personify intangible nature, allowing us to become part of the wind’s dynamic as it is felt through the line of the kite.’ In short, Chagnaud uses the motif of a kite to make the invisible, visible.
Chagnaud’s approach to materials in the exhibition reflects a deep care and attention to the environment. The show also includes a walk journal documenting the artist’s research and reflections and a site-specific mural, created over a week working at East Gallery, to echo the strata of chalk, sandstone, and sand through colour and texture. Together, these elements bring a unique, multi-sensory invitation to contemplate deep time, change, and our momentary place within the natural world.