Seascape exhibition making waves at De La Warr Pavilion

SUSAN Collins is the British artist whose new body of work, Seascape, is currently showing in the De La Warr Pavilion.

A combination of digital technology and prints, Seascape is tailored to the dimensions of the Pavilion, as Collins explains:

"The team knew exactly what I wanted - even with the first print, which I didn't want framed but had to set apart, they came up with the idea of an alcove. They understood immediately.

"Certain developments in the print based work have emerged as a direct response to the architecture and proportions of the gallery."

The first print, "Folkestone, 25 October 2008 at 11.41am" faces the door of Gallery 1. As the viewer approaches, a reconsideration of perspective takes place as a delicately lit seascape becomes a blocky work, characterised by crude boundaries of colour.

The prints are stills from a series of five real-time projections along the south window, displaying imagery captured by five webcams situated along the south coast.

The heavy pixelation is, Collins says, the result of bandwidth problems she encountered whilst developing this approach during a residency in Melbourne. She mentions the importance of this constraint to her work.

For a picture to change completely takes seven hours, or roughly one tide, meaning there are over three complete image cycles in the course of a day.

This structure develops Collins' earlier work.

She said: "My earlier landscape works used the timeframe of a pixel a second, where the whole image disappeared in just under a day and night was visible as a band of black in each image.

"In developing Seascape I was keen to open up the potential for a greater variation and abstraction within the image."

One interesting result of this is what Collins describes as the "accrual of the image over time". So in "Bexhill-On-Sea, 30 October 2008 at 12.26pm", seven brown pixels in a grey-white sky become a cloud of gulls when you back away. Other stray pixels denote windsurfers or yachts. A ghostly ferry was being erased from the projection of Stokes Bay as I watched.

Collins chose Margate, Folkestone, Pagham and Stokes Bay for the project, but says she recognised Bexhill as the lynchpin from the moment she came to the Pavilion:

"The architecture of the gallery, with its wall of windows looking out towards the sea, immediately suggested this approach.

"I can't help but find some kind of an architectural parallel in the De La Warr Pavilion, which is itself a pioneering new form of building set within a traditional Edwardian seaside landscape."

She describes the prints, which form the traditional counterpart to the technology, as a "guilty pleasure", perhaps because selecting them from the vast archive (Seascape saves each image every five minutes, producing 1440 images each day) is a subjective process compared to the projections.

The comment makes me wonder whether Collins' art is in the realisation of a process.

She has no control over what colour the next pixel will be ("There will be grey days where the image will be dull and inconsequential") but the reduction of a horizon to a steady intake of uniform hues demonstrates an interesting way of seeing.

Perhaps the prints must stand as aesthetic compositions in their own right, but the images projected along the south window seem less important than the process of producing them, the consideration this required and the concentration produced in an audience following their progress.

Stepping back from this challenge to admire delicately lit landscapes feels more comfortable, less complete.