The River Flowing through My Kitchen – a practice led inquiry into the aesthetic materiality binding body and world

Abstract

ABSTRACT The opaque, anthropocentric structure of the contemporary Australian single-family home focuses attention inward. Observing the continual movement of materials generating the home's stasis, reveals entanglement in vast assemblages of ecology and geography. Water's passage through the home becomes allegory for continuum of planet, place, home and body. This creative piece combines photography and writing to track this process through which the aesthetic continuum between the body and the worlds became tangible. It is contextualised through the tension carried from North East Victorian valleys settled by my Anglo-Celtic ancestors, and later flooded by the damming of the Murray and Mitta Mitta Rivers. Multi-artform practice combining photography, journaling, video, sculpture, drawing, and installation enabled practice-led examination of the tributaries to that embodied tension. I draw from artistic examples, such as Artist Marily Cintra's description of the painful generosity of rivers suspended in dams, pipelines, showers and dishwashers, or Noori Nuemark's ‘overhearing’ wherein additional sounds overlap with the focal object of listening. Through slow persistent ‘situated listening’ I attuned to water's flow through my home until one evening it spontaneously appeared, the river diverted and dreaming in the space between my kitchen and bathroom.