Tania Kovats @ Fruitmarket

The centrepiece of Oceans, All at Sea has been in progress since 2012, with the grand ambition of collecting water from all the world’s seas in the one place. Glass vials and bottles line shelves, carefully numbered, with an accompanying index revealing both their source and their collector’s name. There’s inquisitive fun to be had scrutinising the list – artists around the world have contributed, plus gallerists and members of the public; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is responsible for a surprising number of the samples. 

The decontextualised liquids and their means of display are placed somewhere between the scientific and the homely. The clarity of all but the Forth sample is a surprise – perhaps man’s influence is less than we are led to believe? Coupled with a shade of local embarrassment – our Leith water is worse than China’s?

Alongside this is Only Blue, a work from 2013. Atlases are laid out on broad-topped plinths, overlapping and spread open to form the proportionally-inexact continents. The atlases’ landmasses have been half-heartedly redacted, painted white in a thin wash to allude to a world without land where the water is all. The viewer stands in the ocean, as played by the air, the space between the continents another metaphorical water, surveying a liquid future without a Kevin Costner to rescue us.

Drawings displayed on the walls surrender control of the process to the materials themselves, and by extension to the elements. Water is poured on ink on blotting paper, mixing together to form its own tracings. A photographic triptych, Cape Reinga, New Zealand, 2014, restores the elements to the vista, serving as a simultaneous reminder of the sublime and the lingering peril of the open ocean. Upstairs, barnacles painted in white gesso lie on the floor, their use in real form another act of surrender to nature’s artistry. Throughout, Kovats interrogates the act of creation, riffing on themes of landscape and man's place within it.

The piece in which the artist’s hand is most present, Sea Mark, a seascape constructed of glazed ceramic tiles on the back wall, reveals the stylized decorative futility of man’s mimicry of nature. It contains none of the power of the water. One leaves Oceans with a creeping sense of the vastness of the world’s waters, the overwhelming force of nature, and the tenuousness of human existence when measured next to them. [Rosamund West]