River Windush

Memory of river, sounds, burbling brook, deep silent dark movement. Flow and ebb, crossings, upstream, down stream, mid stream. Sense of imagined vortexes noticed by the movement of leaves, twigs, surface reflections, deeper spiralling depths. Never still, never the same, constant flux, changes in direction and form, erosion.

It began when…

I noticed how important the notion of ‘river’ was to me. My unconscious knowledge and sense of a river always being close, of carving the landscape. How I just accept it as a constant. Then I walked along the Windrush River. Lifeless and murky.

VALUING THE RIVER

The water, plants, resources. The earth revealed by the river. Geology exposed, the river becoming the gateway to the invisible. The making of silt and clay. But how disconnected we become when the river is hidden underground piped through culverts and sewers.

DEVIATE

To question begins with a quest and a journey into the unknown. The most insightful quest begins with ‘why’, especially when addressing what you assume to be already true. Because our truths are highly linked to assumptions, change them and you change the whole system. I note that when conversations deviate from the mundane, new unexpected places are opened up. Dialogue becomes animated people become passionate and empowered. Others are listening.

When I mention rivers people start engaging with their experiences and thoughts. Dogs nearly dying from drinking water in the River Windrush to extreme marathon runs in the Amazon where despite the heat, humidity and insects the worse part was the industrial and human effluent.

How do we activate our connections? The river is a deep routed system within ourselves. We are water and the ebb and flow within us is as it is for all living things drawn from the ground and air.

COLOUR

How difficult it is to find the colours, the murky browns, dense and deep hiding the usual clarity? Somehow my paints are drawn to replicating the vibrant imagined colours and not the noticed polluted browns. My imagined river being dashed by reality. The flow of tap water on my brush glides easily across the surface of my paper. The blue of liquid ink runs across my page.

WHY

Is the juncture between science, anthropology and art at the heart of the ‘why’ questions? Questions not being asked to enable us to formulate new perceptions and innovative new developments. ‘Big data’, blinding, confusing, unfathomable.

DIALOGUE

These dialogues become critical to the narrative of the river. The memories and stories bringing the river alive in our minds making them relevant. I have learnt people hold a lot of knowledge about places and natural habitat and seem compelled to share this with me. How do we create a space for this sharing?

River as pathway, artery, life giving. Sustenance. The value and importance of the river is noted through scale on old maps. We can not see the river as a whole, we see glimpses and imagine its source upstream and flow downstream. We map the river in our imaginations and we select and invent. Each time we walk the course of the river we create a new map, fixing a part of it in our memory forever.

I would like to walk with others to see what we find and notice. To give time to the river.