Slack Water

Slack water is the short, still moment when the tide has stopped rising and has not yet begun to fall. Maren Oduya has spent three years making work inside that pause.

Across three rooms of Shed 3, Oduya grows salt crystals on unprimed linen, casts ballast stones from harbour plaster and prints the tide table of a single morning at Merrow. Nothing here is a picture of the sea. Everything is something the sea left behind — a crust, a stain, a weight, a timetable.

Every work is hung on the building’s old high-water line, 148 centimetres above the floor, where the flood of 1953 left a white mark on the plaster. Oduya asked for the line to stay visible. Walk the rooms slowly; the water has only just stopped.