How can we come into contact with rivers we cannot touch? Join artist Becky Lyon for an exhibition reclaiming contact with water through experimental photography, found materials and performative interventions. The artworks are enlivened by a dynamic, joyful and hopeful conference confluence of splash performances and BYOS aka bring your own slide community lectures.

England’s rivers embody a crisis of nature in England: it has become out of touch. 

Privatisation and pollution has severed access to waters we would have once shared in common and held sacred; rivers are wastelanded whilst the labour of repair falls on bodies whose resources can be wasted; taking action hinges on estranged and remote numbers rather than lived, learned and sensory knowledge and experience.

This artistic research investigates how different forms of making contact with water — often without being able to touch it — becomes a way of surfacing and making tangible its politics. The artwork manifests primarily through experimental photography techniques where glass, photographic emulsion, reel and found junk become a contact point with riverine materials (water, toxins, contaminated clay, cleaning materials). The process of making becomes rituals or performances that restore a sense of the sacred. 

This inquiry was prompted by my ongoing relationship with North London’s River Brent and its tributaries spanning the reservoir of the Welsh Harp in Barnet, the healing waters of Kilburn and the mouth of the Thames in Brentford. The etymology of the River Brent ripples somewhere between ‘holy one’ and the river goddess Brigantia gesturing towards a once sacred watery body that like many other rivers in England have become profoundly injured ecologies. 

These waters are more often tended, resuscitated and honoured by devoted volunteers. Their knowledge and work will be celebrated and showcased during an afternoon conference confluence of splash performances and BYOS aka bring your own slide community lectures. From Butoh-inspired dance, to performing-with cleaning materials, sounds of the river and activism-through-embroidery, expect space for both still reflection and bubbling hope.