Melissa McGill. Watermark

Watermark, a solo exhibition by Melissa McGill, brings together a selection of recent and previously unseen works centred on one of the artist’s most enduring subjects: water as a living presence, an active creative agent and a force capable of connecting places, people and memories. Through newly produced watercolours, works made with natural pigments, photographs and reimagined maps, the exhibition offers an intimate insight into a practice that has, for more than three decades, combined artistic experimentation, environmental research and close engagement with specific landscapes.
At the heart of the exhibition is McGill’s understanding of water not simply as a natural element, but as a relational system linking bodies, ecosystems, histories and communities. Her works emerge from a process of listening to the ways water manifests itself through flows, rhythms, sedimentation and transformation. These observations become tools for interpreting the landscape and imagining new modes of coexistence with the environment. In many pieces, the artist incorporates water collected directly from the places she studies, allowing the landscape itself to participate in the creation of the artwork.
A key group of works is the Venetian Lagoon Studies, a series of watercolours inspired by the ever-changing colours of the Venetian Lagoon. Developed through sustained observation of shifting light, atmospheric conditions and water surfaces, these works explore the lagoon’s chromatic and sensory transformations. They represent an important stage in the research that later informed Marea, McGill’s independent participatory project presented in Venice during the 2026 Biennale.
Alongside the watercolours, the exhibition features works on Yupo paper created with natural pigments, including organic indigo and chlorophyll extracted from mulberry leaves. In these pieces, water acts as a generative force, guiding the movement and transformation of colour across the surface. Through gradual processes of absorption, evaporation and layering, forms emerge that evoke currents and the traces left by water within the landscape.
The exhibition also includes a series of photographs derived from paintings by Canaletto, on which McGill has drawn waves and water movements. These interventions introduce a sense of fluidity and instability into the artist’s celebrated Venetian views, opening a broader reflection on environmental change and the growing impact of climate change on aquatic ecosystems worldwide.
Another important body of work is Eridanus, developed through McGill’s research on the River Po. Drawing on the myth of Eridanus, associated throughout history with both an ancient river and a constellation, the series explores connections between earth and cosmos, past and present, personal experience and collective memory.
Moving between lagoon, river and lake, Watermark reveals a practice that seeks not merely to represent water, but to make visible its language.