Caragh thuring biography

Sandwiched between the Hertford Union Canal, the River Lea and the A12 is a littleknown patch of land called Fish Island. This area of east London is busy with building work and rows of hoardings advertise offplan flats – a reversal of the postwar pullingdown of houses to make way for factories and distribution centres. But elements of its industrial past remain, including several late-19th-century warehouses, now largely repurposed as artists’ studios like this one. ‘I find the functionality satisfying,’ says Caragh Thuring of the space she has occupied for a decade and a half. ‘The I-beams and the rivets – it’s solid and grand.’

Caragh grew up on the west coast of Scotland, where the splendour of the landscape was juxtaposed with oil rigs, the Holy Loch submarine base and the mighty Clyde Docks. ‘I enjoy the clash and the idea that the materials for those structures come from underground,’ she explains. It has informed her desire to explore the human relationship with our immediate environment. Imagined volcanoes, with their ‘beauty and malevolence’, are a repeated motif, along

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