Flowstate
Conversations With Water exhibition, Ruskin Mill, Gloucestershire, until June 23rd
Somewhere at the back of last year I felt I needed to book some exhibitions for this coming year, to give me a focus in my own practice, alongside the other work I do as an illustrator.
I’m in the middle of the second of three at the moment, inhabiting a space at Ruskin Mill in Nailsworth near Stroud.
Ruskin Mill, as its name suggests, was a working mill, built around Horsley Brook, a small, beautiful stream dropping from springs near Kingscote through rich deciduous woods and quiet valleys, joining Nailsworth Stream and flowing on to meet River Frome in Stroud and on to River Severn, Bristol Channel, and out into open ocean. It’s now a progressive learning environment for young adults with complex learning support needs, and has a lively programme of arts - a beautiful gallery space, a thriving cafe, and a permissive footpath that allows the public to walk up the length of the lower valley, between millponds, trout pools, and the sinuous stream. The waterscape is also peppered with flowforms - thoughtfully and beautifully designed water features that have been designed to cultivate beautiful movement in the water and to rhythmically oxygenate the flow - designed and produced by the Ebb and Flow company by Simon Charter and colleagues, on the Ruskin Mill site. Water flows through the whole space - Horsley Brook runs just a few metres from the gallery door, and there’s even accommodation for water within the stonework of the gallery - at the base of the stairs an outlet of a pipe opens into a small aperture housing a small millstone, and cleft in the limestone blocks through which Water runs. A tiny tender plant has grown there, roots finding enough nourishment, leaves finding enough light - at the same time both incredibly fragile and defiantly thriving. I am waiting with bated breath for enough rain that the flow in the gallery activates…
Conceiving the exhibition has been a strangely, movingly, surprisingly, unsurprisingly fluid, Riverlike process. I decided to focus on my work with Water, and so Conversations With Water seemed the right title; and alongside multiple pieces that are kind of visual poems - written texts with images that document moments and insights and feelings drawn from experiences with River - that I would share for the first time the hydroglyphs that I’ve been making over the past three years.
Because so much of my developing work has been nourished by the Living Waters programme, and in particular the group of five of us - Mado, Marina, Sofia and Jaq and myself - Riverkin - that have continued to meet online to share our water experiences long after the ending of the official eight week programme, it also felt strongly appropriate to invite somehow a presence from each of us in the space - despite the fact that only two of us are in the UK (300 miles apart), and the other three in France, Italy and Portugal.
So in the two weeks prior to installing the show, boxes arrived from around Europe - drawings, river stones, writings, drawings, pigments - an extraordinary and touching physical manifestation of these shared journeys, without even having met in person. Like tributaries converging. Water from River Glen in Northumberland and L’Arveyron in the French Alps and the Acquabona spring at Castel Campo in Northern Italy, have made their way here. The container for the latter had broken in transit, but the shards of glass were still wet, so I was able to take some drops of water on my finger and add them to water from Horsley Brook, River Frome, L’Arveyron, Glen. Our waters have physically and symbolically said hello to each other.
In the fortnight preceding the opening, I made two new pieces for Horsley Brook - meditations born of two walks I made beyond the Mill grounds, in the wet, green fecundity of the small valley that holds Brook. I’ve walked the valley making new hydroglyphs, beginning to tune in to the variety of languages that River speaks here, in still pools and wind-ruffled lakes, in culverted water emerging, in oxygenated flow-forms, in stream-channels gently meandering through flushes of waterweed, making little books of 12 hydroglyphs in a concertina of paper as a way of documenting a river-walk - wordlessly and non-figuratively - like a little visual song for that short time.
Water has permeated everything - there have been days with heavy rain, thunder shaking the air, making hydroglyphs with water falling on the paper as I’m drawing.
As I’ve been hanging sets of hydroglyphs, made in different locations (River Frome, the Atlantic Ocean in North Devon, Horsley Brook) - I’ve noticed that having carefully kept the drawings in chronological order, in packets marked with location and date - how if a string snapped or someone unclipped them, how their order would immediately be irrevocably disrupted. This caused me a momentary tension, until, of course, I realised that this is how water behaves - not static, not fixed - moving, generous, interconnected, the energy of wind or gravity or a duck’s paddling feet shifting molecules in infinite variety; and that I could embrace that possibility with the work.
Today I’m working out how to display an arrangement of hydroglyphs made here, and specifically inviting people to take one; embodying Water energy - and also to replace one with a card on which they’ve contributed a word or reflection or drawing, that can feed into another piece of work. I’m imagining taking these contributions and making hydroglyphs on the reverse, a kind of confluence of Water and me and the community that visit the space…
I’m loving the feeling of the show embodying a kind of Water energy - not being the unveiling of a fixed body of work, but something that has porosity and flow and an aliveness that is presenting itself as the exhibition unfolds - and it feels like I’m a sort of steward of that flow, rather than the centre of it…the concept of ‘kincentrism’ - that at the centre of things is community and relationship - feels invigoratingly tangible, and I feel already a sense of focus towards developing this work in the months ahead.
The exhibition runs until the 23rd June - free entry, open every day from 10am to 4pm.
https://rmlt.org.uk/venues/ruskin-mill-gallery-nailsworth/
