Sea Birds and Estuary and Branch 2010 - Tania Kovats

Purchased for The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery by Contemporary Art Society, in memory of Paul Collett, 2010

Paul Collett, a visionary arts officer for Camden Council, North London, he was a pioneer in the work he did to achieve public sculpture in the borough. He died in 2006 at the age of 44. At this time a collection was made amongst friends and colleagues with the aim of making a purchase for a public collection. The Contemporary Art society was asked to guide the purchase and distribution of this commemorative gift.

After completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in 1990, Tania Kovats (b.1966) won the Barclays Young Contemporaries award at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991. Her work deals primarily with the experience and understanding of landscape. Her sculptural forms and drawings are pre-occupied with the earth’s shifting geology. Sea Birds and Estuary is part of an on-going series called The Library, in which Kovats redraws the covers of nostalgic natural history books. The second work, Branch is a limited edition work that emerged from her recent major commission at the Natural History Museum.

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery is committed to developing its contemporary art and craft collections and to supporting contemporary artists working in all media, they were part of the CAS Special Collections Scheme in the mid-nineties where they bought work by Grayson Perry, Gavin Turk and Jacqui Poncelet. Sea and Estuary will be well contextualised witinh their small but developing collection of drawings part of which has a focus on illustration. In addition, with Kovats’ preoccupation in natural history the works will also present exciting opportunities for the curators to create links between the art collections and the natural history collections at Stoke.