Exhibited at GroundWork Gallery, Kings Lynn, UK across 14 Oct – 13 Dec 2025. Produced within ‘Fluid Earth’ residency at the gallery in August, 2025.

Video 6’25’’

The artwork centres on three chalk rivers that flow through or around King’s Lynn: the Babingley, Gaywood, and Nar. Sound and image were recorded near their sources, where the riverbeds—the focus of the video—teem with life. Here, the rivers are at their healthiest, relatively less impacted by humans: less polluted by run-off and wastewater, and less subject to channelling, dredging, or clearance for flood defence.

The video adopts a glitch aesthetic that amplifies the rivers’ richness while framing this vitality as precarious—already diminished downstream and at risk upstream— appearing as though archival remnants of past or future ruin. I also connect this aesthetic to my identity, reading it as queer in line with Jack Halberstam’s ‘The Queer Art of Failure’. My use of outmoded technologies and second-hand vinyl, from which the soundtrack is composed, extends this connection to failure. Following Halberstam, imperfection, malfunction, obsolescence, and fragmentation are modes of resistance to normative logics of mastery, proficiency, progress, and linearity, gesturing toward more sympathetic, less domineering ways of being. He also proposes “undoing” as another form of resistance. Applied to rivers, this might mean refusing dredging or working to restore downstream stretches to the abundance found upstream.