A human attempting to capture the perspective of a fish fleeing upstream by dragging a stick in water.

The story of a brook.

A Vanishing Landscape - 2018

As people enter the installation, words from the past flow from a concrete pipe emerging from the wall. I encased a real sample of the brook water, placing it in the path of the supposed water flow. The water flow manifests in a small projection to the side, and much like water, the large projection reflects light faintly upon the wall behind. In one of my video stills I observed a crossing, which was engineered by way of leading the brook through a concrete pipe. Not only have the marshes of old been tamed by asphalt and concrete, but the stream that named the town is a mere memory caught in webbings of pipe. In The story of a brook. I address this engineering with the help of a concrete sewage pipe and a recording of a text describing the area in 1930. The words of a forgotten scholar echo from the pipe, praising the beauty of a landscape. The work A human attempting to capture the perspective of a fish fleeing upstream by dragging a stick in water. anthropomorphises the view of a fish, warily I do this (I will never be a fish) but I cannot help to simply wonder what view a fish might have when swimming. Placing things at a low view point in the exhibition space implies a certain playfulness, it is a form of reverse where the adults learn to play again with the help of imagination from a child, crouching, imagining, being the fish. Two badly adapted animals travelling upstream in search of the past. came to be through conversation with my father about his childhood memories of fishing trout. We returned in early 2018 to catch a brook trout – a species that was originally from America – it turned out to be quite the endeavour. The work in itself thus became the search, searching for the past whilst trying to navigate the new undergrowth. This seemingly simple search turned into the realization of how swiftly changes occur. 

Installation view