POROUS
standing here we listen to the slow flow of water
- bright stream, bright river -
and the seeming reply of voiceless song,
a murmur that feels like a memory.
We’ve raised the red people
Are they happy?
Yes - they’re happy.
Red?
Like red mud - like red sandstone.
Ah .. old then? Ancients?
Yes. Very old.
Film - Water & Fire - ‘song of the sun’ (10’32 minutes)
flipbook version of POROUS ZINE avaiable here: https://midd.me/J7v2
We turned and walked away from the small river-beach where we had been working - standing midstream, singing with the river as it made its own song through our legs and bare toes. We walked together, a small group of us, out from the low canopy of leaning willow and reed-grass, onto the wide meadow.
POROUS focused on an encounter with the River Lugg and Upper Lugg Meadows between Candlemas and Lammas 2026. A group participation (‘conversation with a river’ 30th May) and my own collaboration with River and Meadow drew on ritual, the mythic / folkloric, the remembered, the ancestral, the yet to come. An immersive multi-media installation worked around the four elements (Hereford 12th - 18th July) was accompanied by a zine of poetry, photos, theory & reflections.
The work developed through a series of improvised, imagined and informed ‘dialogues'. Dialogue here is based on Karen Barad’s ‘intra-action’ (2007) - a co-constitution in relationship with other.
Processes of the work were improvised, extending away from the actual into the imaginary. Methods included deep listening, collective intuitive sound-making, the sharing of song, inhabiting of story. The materiality of mark-making emerged over the course of the project - working with the River and the other lives enfolded there, present and past, on the flat Meadows at the edge of Hereford city.
The work developed in awareness of flooding as a political, ecological and social concern, and of the threat to rivers from our waste and excess. Inviting critical reflection on climate breakdown, POROUS aims to challenge the fragmentation of our belonging that has been mediated through capitalism and colonialism.
My collaboration with the River and Meadow is concerned with strategies for repair, and curious about the potential for a relational process-led work to re-new an embodied sense of kinship with the multiplicity of place.
Thank you to the River Lugg and Upper Lugg Meadows - this creative collaboration acknowledges that our rights and the rights of the land are one. In recognition of the moral authorship of the River Lugg and Meadow in this work half of all profits from any sales will be passed to a local river charity.
Also to all those who joined me and participated in a conversation with the River Lugg on the 30th May, including - Catherine King, Di Hemming, Gayle Brogan, Jaime Jackson, Jaine Yule, Jo Khimba, Kat Terry, Mark Waters, Paul Cross, Renske Tobyn, Ryan James, Sally Payen, Samantha Watson, Soesen Edan. And to Nick Jonah Davis for the audio file mastering - Chris Plant for the generous loan of TV and technicals - Herefordshire Wildlife Trust and Herefordshire Lore for information and support.
Artworks - mud paintings and canvases created with the River Lugg, and a 20 page Zine - are available for sale. A catalogue of the works is available here.