High Tide Low Tide Exhibition
Rooted in both Miami’s tidal geography and Mette Tommerup’s Scandinavian heritage, Tommerup’s practice draws from a Nordic tradition of reduction – an elemental paring down that foregrounds atmosphere, light, and spatial perception over representation. Ocean, earth, dusk, and the auroral phenomena of the northern lights operate not as imagery but as structural conditions: forces that dissolve boundaries, destabilize orientation, and expand the field of painting beyond the wall. Through these immersive spatial propositions, she positions painting as a phenomenological encounter-an embodied threshold where architecture, landscape, and viewer converge.
High Tide Low Tide unfolds as a cycle of five public interventions inspired by the rhythms of the sea. Rather than representing the ocean, the project follows the movement of the tide itself its continual revealing and concealing of landscapes, memories, and emotional worlds. Across all five interventions, High Tide Low Tide proposes that creativity moves like the sea itself. It arrives in cycles. It uncovers hidden landscapes within us before gently covering them again, reminding us that what disappears is never truly lost. Beneath every shoreline and within every person another world waits for the tide to return.
Written by Mette Tommerup
Photo Credit:
Blue Canvas Sphere on Shoreline, 2026
Raw canvas and permanent acrylic paint
Photo courtesy of the artist
Exhibition Schedule
Wave 1: Sphere
Saturday, September 12, 2026: 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
A performance on Deering Estate’s waterfront lawn that predates the official opening of High Tide Low Tide. A movement artist will engage with the first installation of High Tide Low Tide.
Wave 2: Shelter & Between Tides
Saturday, October 10, 2026: 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM
The official opening of High Tide Low Tide, led by a movement-based performance and installation activation, also featuring musical accompaniment. Visitors are encouraged to traverse Deering Grounds, immersing themselves in a world of whimsy and calm. Shelter features blue canvases suspended in the trees, canvas covered boulders inspired by the Maine coastline, and a blue shelter that reimagines the Sea King’s palace as a place of refuge, care, and imagination. Between Tides includes blue canvas paintings transform the pathways into temporary tidal channels that visitors walk through and inhabit.
Wave 3: High Tide Low Tide
Saturday, October 24, 2026: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
A performance in the Deering Estate Visitor Center Theater, directed by artist and writer Mette Tommerup, where the baseboard of Tommerup’s artistic practice, the canvas, takes a life of its own. This performance is inspired by The Little Mermaid, exploring emotional currents, transformation, and the unseen worlds revealed through creativity.
Wave 4: King Tide
Sunday, November 8, 2026: 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM
The Finale of High Tide Low Tide, marked by a sunset viewing on the Deering Estate Front Lawn, followed by an open mic night in the Deering Estate Visitor Center Theater. Directed by Mette Tommerup and emceed by Deering Contemporary Curator Amaranta Mattie. This mic night brings the project to its fullest expression through poetry, music, storytelling, and shared voices. Participants are encouraged to sign up to view or share their short stories or poems.
Ticket Details
Tickets are free and available on the Deering Estate Website through Eventbrite RSVP.
Tickets can be acquired ONLINE ONLY
Please view your ticket for more details.
About the Artist
Mette Tommerup (b. Denmark) is a Miami-based artist who’s monumental, site-responsive painting installations expand painting into three-dimensional space, transforming architecture into immersive environments. Dissolving the boundary between surface and structure, her work activates walls, façades, and civic sites as immersive fields of color, gesture, and movement.
Tommerup earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and has exhibited widely across South Florida, nationally, and internationally. Recent solo projects include Act of Infinity (2025) at the historic Køng Museum in Denmark – a large-scale installation advancing her exploration of painting as spatial threshold and premiering her video work Ocean Contour Performance (2022); Of What Surrounds (2024) at the Frost Art Museum FIU; and Made by Dusk (2020) at Locust Projects, featuring the interactive activation Liminal. Her public art commissions extend this immersive language into civic space through Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places program. Notable works include Sky of the First Water (2022), a 2,100-square-foot hand-engraved façade in Coconut Grove, and Ocean Contour (2022), a 185-foot-widepainting at PortMiami – projects that embed painting within the city’s daily life and infrastructure.
Tommerup’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Frost Art Museum FIU, the Lowe Art Museum, the Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places Collection, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, among others. Her honors include the Miami Individual Artists (MIA) Grant (2024, 2025) and the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2010).
Tommerup is the former head of the Painting Program at Florida International University, where she taught BFA and MFA students, and she continues to mentor emerging artists through lectures, workshops, and collaborative initiatives.
For more information, visit Mette Tommerup’s website.