DRINK THE RIVER is a collection of moving image and sound-based works, developing ways of sensing, sounding, and relating to and with the River Eden in Cumbria. The collection seeks to respond to questions of “modern water” – exploring issues of representation and how abstraction leads to extraction from the river. The River Eden – 90 miles running south to north through the county of Cumbria – is one of the top 20 most polluted rivers in the UK. It is also my home. I was confronted with the ecological realities – dramatic flooding, sewage pollution, private land ownership – making it increasingly difficult to have daily encounters with this river. In DRINK THE RIVER (the collection of image and sound-based research projects that have grown out of this work) I became obsessed with the ways in which the River Eden is seen, understood, represented and framed, and how these ways of knowing nudge us towards certain ways of relating. For example, 90 MILES (2024) – an “armchair voyage” down the Eden – is the starting point and explores the abstraction of the river into maps and statistics – an abstraction that enables the separation from, and control over, the river. DRINK. DON’T SWALLOW! (2023) takes this abstraction even further, reframing the absurdity of our “modern” definitions, and the overspilling commodification of water. DRINK THE RIVER (2024) – the video game that the whole collection takes its name from – responds to separation, as barriers of ownership and pollution compelled us to rebuild the River Eden in this watery (re)imagined world. Contrasting the abstracted and extractive, in all works the body is centred. The methodology I developed throughout involved daily repeated simple acts of swimming in the Eden – this grew into the final piece in the collection, a line made by swimming (2024), not necessarily a film, but a documentation of a performance. Taking its name from Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, itself growing out of ‘simple creative acts of swimming and marking’… becoming ‘about place, locality, time, distance and measurement and rhythm’ and a messy (un)knowing of this leaky, diffuse, turbid, transforming river.
Rosa Prosser (Mon,) studied this question.