ABSTRACT
Referencing a selection of geographically situated long-durational involvements, these reflections on water heritages and futures are a distillation of hybrid creative responses to complex site-specific and mytho-poetic dynamics. My use of cinematic and sculptural assemblage draws on past legacies and enables the exploration of new considerations of ecological place-relationships. There is no single thread nor argument in the streams of watery activations and flights of fancy described here. Like water, there is flowing, meandering, braiding and mixing – addressing biophysical space and time patterns (cyclical, oscillatory or spiral-like) and imaginative future-speculations. We tend to accept biophysical observations as ‘fact’; I emphasise here an equivalent acceptance of the truths of the experiential, intuitive and symbolic. This is not a striving for ever-elusive denouements, but rather a celebration of ‘ostranenie’ – seeing the familiar in a strange, or new, light.
Creative research is mycelial and rhizomic, embracing a cluster of approaches, positioned here as geopoetic enquiries. These have a flavour of ethnographic and geographical study, attuning to eco-social and political undercurrents and shadows, while engaging with deep-time and cyclical-time perspectives. The Sunless Waters of Forgetfulness is a ‘commodious vicus of recirculation’, 1 flowing among many thinkers and makers, including my titular references to Ivan Illich’s H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness and the ‘sunless sea’ from S.T Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. Illich is an appropriate anchor here, as he was a pioneer in shining a light on expanded multi-facetted human–water relationships. Likewise, Coleridge’s ‘esemplastic’ imagination reached far beyond Romantic poetry, encompassing holistic philosophy and socio-political activism.
