Open the Mermaid’s phone and listen, shake the bottle and let the Estuary Spirits enchant you, open the pages of the book and let the story wash over you…
Euphrosyne and the Harty Spring tells the tale of Euphrosyne, captured by the devil on the Harty banks, before eventually being rescued by the merfolk and starting a new-found life with them.
Euphrosyne is a Greek goddess of cheer and mirth, with the setting of Harty Ferry making the work a ‘hearty’ tale of wellness and healing – becoming whole.The tale tells of finding one’s true nature and the regeneration of the natural spring at Harty Ferry, Oare Creek, Kent.
The work uses a range of mediums to connect us with Euphrosyne and the water, with the tale told first and foremost through a beautifully handwritten and illustrated book. Through the mermaid’s phone, in the form of a golden oyster shell, we hear the sounds of the water and the language of the merpeople. The work is mounted onto estuary driftwood, with a shaking bottle of estuary spirits.
As a keen swimmer and sailor, artist Sonia McNally has always felt connected to the water. She took inspiration from Margate’s Shell Grotto, a place of nautical mystery, and the rite to Isis, which McNally enacted to start the piece.
Like a lot of the works in the Museum of Imagined Kent, figures here have been taken from elsewhere in place and time, and transported to the county of Kent. In this way, we can link Euphrosyne and the Harty Spring to pieces such as Hannah McDonald’s The Myth of Salacia, where the Roman goddess of saltwater comes to modern-day Whitstable. This work also explores similar themes to Vadim Ezhov’s Rupert the Fearless, where a nymph is held against her will by a spiteful man (in this case, the devil), but eventually gets her comeuppance.
Learn more about the artist here.
Read the tale in full here.
Buy a copy of the book here.