‘The river is always communicating’ a blog by Amy Carter Gordon
‘The river is always communicating’
Amy Carter Gordon in collaboration with Alban Krashi & Jonny Douglas: The River Dôn Project
I live and work in close proximity to the River Sheaf, a tributary of the Dôn. Within this biotic community, I hear the 5am calls of a Tawny Owl and witness the underside of a heron’s wingspan as it flies past my window. A fox makes its den close by and bats appear as the evenings lengthen. All the while, the river dramatically surges and overspills, trickles and meanders in response to the peaks and troughs of our seasons. This life, sustained by the river, nourishing all within it, nourishes me and is a part of my creative practice, where I daydream and marvel at its changes; where inspiration readily finds me.
Many people talk of a journey when they begin a project. It is the absolute aliveness of the River Dôn Project (RDP) that captures my imagination and holds it intently – and the propensity for Sheffield Hallam researchers to interact with it are boundless. We are currently collaborating through trans-disciplinary methods including arts, culture, biomolecular and citizen science and through policy research. As diverse as our subject areas, we are united in our desire to apply research and innovation to real-world challenges – and what better way than through a demonstrator in our own region.
Over the last three years, the project has become increasingly embedded in our locality and on a personal level merging seamlessly into other areas of my work – a positive challenge to my preconceptions about what constitutes co-curation and co-production.
Alighting on the title fæthm (fathom) and referencing the opening of an embrace, the depth of our understanding as well as the more common definition of a measurement of the depth of water, felt fitting for a curation in a constant dynamic with its audience, inhabitants, human and more-than-human actors.
The River Dôn is a barometer for all life in the region. Flowing as it does through Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster, it is always communicating with us – but perhaps we have not always had the tools to listen or taken the time to understand. Emergent, complex topics such as the rights of nature, hold at their core opportunities for open dialogue and internal contemplation. A growing movement in response to the climate crisis, the rights of nature move away from treating nature as property or viewing it through an extractive lens into ‘acknowledging that nature and all its life forms have the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.’
fæthm is offered as a series of provocations to consider our enmeshment with the river, the biosphere and the results of human actions drawing us closer to climate breakdown. As such, may this serve as a reflexive work in progress?
My role in the group is to create opportunities for researchers to exchange knowledge with communities and stakeholders to play with new ways of thinking about and being with nature. All that we do derives from a place of valuing the intrinsic knowledges of all the actors in the space.
It continues to be a steep learning curve – my friends and collaborators at Opus Independents are much further down the line in their understanding of the future rights of nature. There has been a much-valued deep sharing and generosity of spirit in bringing myself and others into new ways of thinking about being-with nature. Jonny Douglas states, ‘If we can’t surface, we can’t sense into and experience the complex relationships and we can’t visualise viable alternative ways of being’.
‘Sensing into’ refers to becoming aware by using our senses, as a deeper method of perception. The river cannot be known through our anthropomorphic projections onto it. Situated knowledges might create storytelling around the river, such as this beautiful poem I commissioned, Scythian by Danae Wellington helping to make sense of the intangible using the mythology of the Goddess Danu.
If we start from the the basis that we don’t understand the complexity of the relationship because we rely upon human exceptionalism to simplify the dynamic power of the river into words, we can move into an awareness that the river has always communicated, it is how we have interpreted it and whether we have sought to absorb and ‘sense into’ the messages it has shared.
And our partnership has evolved, from our initial discursive event Modelling the Future Rights of Nature in April 2023 to developing Writing the Water eco-poetry workshops on a barge along Sheffield-Tinsley canal for Being Human Festival, November 2023, we have sought to engage diverse audiences in active debate. My recent curation of Flow State at No Bounds Festival 2024 by Aron Spall and Daniel Bacchus used data derived from Sheffield rivers to create an audio/visual installation at Exchange Place studios. Each iteration of the project has taken us a little further into the dance.
fæthm draws us into new explorations of creative practice with and alongside the river. It would be remiss, therefore not to ask myself; what does it mean to state that this exhibition has been co-curated with the River Dôn, and how might we credibly work towards it, if so? Is the exhibition beneficial to the river and what might the river want from it? How may I claim that this co-curation is not only possible but also valuable? Krashi et al (2024) investigate the rights of nature in a policy of mutually assured flourishing, exploring ecological citizenship and a levelling between humans and more-than-humans.
This exploration has accumulated layers of meaning as we have travelled together – commissioning Sheffield Hallam artist-led river walks in Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham the artworks from which have informed the practice of Hallam artists Joanna Rucklidge and Jo Lee in their installations at fæthm. At the Craft of Science event In March 2024 in partnership with Sheffield Hallam Biomolecular Research Centre, I devised an impromptu continuous community curation for participants to arrange a selection of found river objects and cyanotypes collected and created by artist Cartherine Higham and turn them into an ever-changing scene from which to build or begin again. Here the river revealed itself in new and emerging contexts at the public gallery as we surfaced the questions, how are we collaborating with the gifts and inspiration of the Dôn and how are we changed by the experience – individually and collectively?
For fæthm, I wanted to curate art within, around and in collaboration with the River Dôn. BIDE by Prof. David Cotterrell is a public artwork presented as a boat at the Kelham Island Weir – a delicate indicator of abstracted vulnerability. Watch as it rises and falls in response to data gathered from the river.
From the river bank, Dr Rose Butler presents large-scale photographs of fig leaves made from analogue film stock utilising analogue processing and fig phenols. A 16mm experimental film created in collaboration with Rob Gawthrop captures silt, hemlock and the traces of a rave embedded along the river’s edge.
Through advances in AI, the RDP, Dark Matter Labs and Hive IT are rapidly breaking down barriers in communication pathways with our natural world by creating a chatbot to enable more intimate communication with the river.
Transitioning into the next phase of the project, full of potential for sensing-into the myriad ways we might harness new technologies and emergent creative methodologies to interact with the river on their own terms. fæthm’s swirling coexistence between artist and river, scientist and community, curator and place provides a moment of balance and ecological empathy.
fæthm will take place at Kelham Island Museum from 13-16 March. Full details can be found here.
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[1] Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
[2] Krashi, A., Moran, G., Carter-Gordon, A., Lacey, M., Lock, J., & Cotterrell, D. (2024). The Rights of Nature: A call for a policy of mutually assured flourishing. People, Place and Policy, 18(2), pp. 82-96. https://doi.org/10.3351/ppp.2024.6728445459