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Ebb-Tide is a collaboration between Michael Thomas, photographer, and Monika Buttling Smith, mudlark. It is a photographic representation and interpretation of Monika’s ten year archive of finds and artefacts from the Thames foreshore. The objects date from the Roman occupation of Britain up to the present and are mostly ordinary objects, common in their time, discarded by their owners, washed by the tidal Thames until picked up by Monika. The work shows the surfaces, shapes and energies brought to bear upon the objects by the river, the distortions of time and tide, the patination, delamination, oxidisation and transfiguration that the river imparts. Like the medium of photography, the objects give evidence of a fixed time and place, alluding to a past life whilst being before us in the present, showing fixity, permanence and evidence of their journey in time.
