This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present Layers of Silt, an exhibition of new work on paper and fabric by artist Lotte Gertz. The exhibition will open on 29 June and run until 31 August.

In Layers of Silt, Gertz brings together a new body of work that extends her long-standing exploration of painting and printmaking and includes soft-ground etchings and lithographs that she has produced at Edinburgh Printmakers as part of her 2024-25 RSA Residency for Scotland. Across the works we find fragments and objects drawn from Gertz’s life, offcuts and re-workings of past work, and references to paintings and places such as the Villa of Livia in Rome, which have long resonated with her. Varied in their scale and mediums, the works nevertheless share a sensibility and are held together by an ethic and instinct on Gertz’s part for repair, refuge and reuse, which are, in her own words, ‘emotional, relational and planetary.’

Print, paint, paper and fabric have been generative constants in Gertz’s practice for over twenty years, as have the processes of drawing, collage, writing and reusing. Her work derives from the parameters of her daily life, though not in any literal sense, and materiality is a crucial aspect of her process – a constant moving between making and content, form and idea. In a new essay for the exhibition, Martin Clark writes that the acts of gathering and holding are central to Gertz’s work: ‘It’s there in the practice as it is lived and performed – slowly, incrementally, a day-by-day process of collecting and keeping, of arranging and tending, of looking and making – but also in the structure and operation of the works themselves, the way they accumulate various thoughts, feelings, insights and impulses across their surfaces.’

The exhibition’s title Layers of Silt reflects something of that accumulative process and of the gradual sedimentation of uses and reuses, thinking and rethinking that can build in Gertz’s work over months and sometimes over years. A sense of this approach is evident in Gertz’s notes towards the exhibition: ‘Thinking of items, thoughts, works, materials, composted, reused, recycled, a care of the materials, thoughts of sustainability, composting rather than disposing of, an alchemy of time might bring materials back into the cycle of finished work.’