When I go to meet artist Tania Kovats at the Louis Vuitton Bond Street maison, it feels like the first day in years that it hasn’t rained. Ordinarily that’s the sort of boring weather-related observation that would get you chucked out of a fancy dinner party, but for Kovats, water – and weather – are a way of life.
 
More usually found at home in her moated millhouse in Devon, Kovats is in town to celebrate her involvement in Vuitton’s Curated Shelf project, a space in-store that artists fill with their inspirations and favourite tomes. For her stint, Kovats has chosen various editions of The Sea Around Us by marine biologist Rachel Carson, published first in 1951 and never yet out of print.

‘I don’t see myself as an ecological artist,’ Kovats tells me. ‘Any artist who works with the land or sea right now is obviously aware of the urgency of the conversations about how we manage our planet. But that’s why the Curated Shelf was a really nice opportunity for me to position a book by a writer I think is really important, without being too dogmatic.’
 
Dogma couldn’t be further from Tania Kovats’s artistic agenda, in fact, prioritising as she does experience and interaction in the pieces she creates from natural resources. Her most recent installations, currently on show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, explore the definitions and boundaries of oceans. One work invited people across the world to send flasks of sea water, that Kovats might be able collect all these bodies of water in one place.

‘An image I’ve become quite attached to when talking about the work is that it feels like a sea of stories as well,’ she says. ‘There are just so many narratives in there.’
 
‘I know I’m not the only person to have a special relationship with the sea or feel drawn to it,’ she continues. ‘I think water has a kind of parallel status with time – the river passing and time passing. The way the sea is always in motion, so when I bottle the water and make it still, it’s like freezing time. The equivalent to a photograph.'

Kovats has also bottled water from rivers across the UK, and from the points at which seas meet across the globe, in northern Denmark, southern India and northern New Zealand, for another work displayed at the Vuitton store, a trip she undertook as part of the luxury brand’s Art of Travel initiative.
 
Exploration is key to her, a theme she also develops in her latest book Drawing Water, which looks at the mapping of the natural world and all its elements through the practice of sketching.

‘I wanted to look at drawing quite specifically as a means of exploration,’ she explains. ‘So in relation to the sea, to cartography, to exploring internal space and the space of the world. I’ve tried to trace a journey through to book, to take the reader on a certain route.’
 
Despite all this sea-faring and topography, Tania Kovats is keen that her work has a human element to, never forgetting her own experiences creating pieces nor the effect they will have on other people. Her ‘Tree’ to celebrate Charles Darwin’s bi-centenary at the Natural History Museum, a 17-metre-long slice of oak which decorates that building and a plantation of 200 saplings to raise in his memory, is just such an example of collaboration and democracy of audience.

‘I do lots of different things,’ she explains. ‘Some are very public or a lot of people are involved in bringing it together. For me, my drawing practice is the most private, the one I retreat to.’
 
But she finds that each of her pieces feed into one another, like rivers do a sea. Just as she followed rivers across the country, so she found tributaries in the shape of the oak grain she worked with, branches and deltas also replicated, she points out, within the human body.

‘You don’t see the connections between work until later on,’ she says, ‘but it all has a liquid language to it, those same branching forms.’
 
‘I’m certainly not going to run out of things to think about!’ she laughs. 

The Tania Kovats Curated Shelf is at Louis Vuitton, New Bond Street, London W1S and Tania Kovats Oceans is at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh EH1 until May 25.