feeling/folding the tributary (2023)
Fungus Press commission for Turf Projects
25 September – 31 December 2023
‘feelng/folding the tributary’ is a series of collages created from photographs of local government archives associated with the river Wandle, including pollution and flooding issues, from the 18th Century to the present day. The works also include details from Enclosure Acts, which privatised land in the UK, expelling people from their homes across Croydon in the 19th Century. These archives are woven with stills from recent films and iPhone photographs from the artist’s personal life, including small moments and hiking trips walking through different privatised lands.
Drawing on forms of ordnance survey maps, post it notes in archival processes and the tracings of material scanned, the collages map the awkward progressions between analogue and digital research. Including the partial presence of loved ones and inchoate fragments of bodies reinvigorates the cold and bureaucratic archives of pollution and land management that mask government inefficiency. The works also employ text used in film scripts, archives, dictionary definitions and everyday digital communication, playing with the connective tissues of language as it is variably cold and warm, close and far, tucked away in folders, typed or handwritten.
