Thames Portfolio

Thames

With its ever-flowing ebbs and floods, The River Thames continuously reshapes its surroundings. Its dynamic moods, energy and flow employ a powerful pull on me and my art practice. This series of images uses as its foundation Peter Ackroyd’s (2007) portrayal of the river as a space of trade and politics, literature, art, culture, identity, tragedy and suicide, as opposed to not just as an inert physical presence stripped of historical or artistic context.

With this work, I explore the idea of impermanence or everchanging flow that leads me towards dissolving the image.

The process of making this work is ritualistic and to an extent, performative. I use a 5x4 camera (with a digital back) to record a visual diary of the responses I notice of the relation of the River Thames with the Waterman stairs. After walking down the stairs on the River Thames sometimes jumping over protection fences, I set up my tripod, mount my camera, and seek a sensorial synchronisation with the River Thames. With my camera setup, I capture multiple long and short exposures, bringing to life otherwise unnoticeable and invisible things. My camera sensor records the light reflection of the river’s splashing water onto the waterman stairs, creating ghostly-looking areas and producing ambiguous and peculiar landscapes of concrete and water.