On Watery Borders, Borderlands, and Tania Kovats’ Head to Mouth

Abstract

With a relational view of landscapes and natural environments as continuously “in process” and formed from the over-layered and interdependent connections between nature and culture, the human and the non-human, this paper considers some recent practices by artists who have worked in the largely rural border region of Northern England and Southern Scotland. Expanding from a focus on the artist Tania Kovats’ 2019 Berwick Visual Arts exhibition, Head to Mouth, and a wider frame of non-anthropocentric ecological thought in relation to the visual arts, it explores the significance of diverse creative engagements with water, here with the River Tweed, and their potential value in a current cross-border context of social and environmental challenges and concern.