The Great Turning: Tidal Signals, Tidal Cycles is the culmination of the first year of a creative leadership partnership between Harbour House and the sixth form at Kingsbridge Community College. It has been developed and delivered by recent graduates, young curators Phoebe Carpenter, Annaliese Paskins, Ellie Trowell and Uinseann Wrigley. The group worked with Devon and Cornwall based artists to create a series of participatory creative workshops exploring our natural surroundings, climate change, and our more-than-human neighbours. These were held in the summer of 2023 in and around Kingsbridge and many of the works made by community members are shown here alongside new collaborative and site-specific works by artists Katharine Platts and Alex Kearney commissioned by the young curators.

Taking the idea of the tide as an agent of radical change in our town, Platts has worked with the young curators to create a fictional narrative around the community workshops. The story unfolds in the film The Great Turning, which takes its title from writer and environmental activist Joanna Macy’s hopeful account of our transition to a life-sustaining society. The narrative describes a series of fictional events in the town following an exceptionally big spring tide, known as a ‘Perigean Tide’, which occurs when the moon is either new or full and closest to earth. The lightbox sculpture series Samples Collected from the Perigean Spring Tide recall specimens washed in by the creek. Ebb made by Alex Kearney from the sounds created during Bronwen Buckeridge’s The Woodland Orchestra evokes the uncanny and strange; recognisable organic sounds become electronic elements for example a wind synth, a foot-stamping-on- earth bass. Looped through an old cassette player, the track changes incrementally like the tide.

A new site-specific installation, Syzygy occupies the second space and invites visitors below the surface of the creek. The term ‘Syzygy’ describes the alignment of three or more celestial bodies, when the sun, moon and earth fall in line with one another - this is when we notice the greatest tidal shifts. The structure of the installation invites the visitor to move through a vortex, alluding to the early twentieth century Austrian naturalist, philosopher and inventor Viktor Schauberger’s belief that water was not a passive substance, but a living organism with its own intelligence and energy and his notable invention the ‘Trout Turbine’ which harnessed the natural vortex motion of water to generate power.

The motif of the vortex appears again, in the final room a chalk wall drawing Kingsbridge after the Perigean Tide: September 2023 drawn collaboratively by Platts and the Young Curators, inspired by local maps, dousing maps and tidal charts. The map locates the workshops and the work made by members of our community in time and space and within the fictional narrative of the exhibition. In this final room, you are invited to take some clay and make a new creature that might live in the creek after ‘The Great Turning.’