'A Hydrological Imaginary’

Abstract

My work questions the ongoing dialogue between technology and nature. This dialogue is most evident in landscapes and their respective ecosystems, specifically rivers. These bodies of water are a fluid mirror reflecting a wavering view of ourselves, a constructed human presence within the natural environment. This thesis offers a way of understanding these pipelines, dams, canals and attendant infrastructures in a conceptual manner. These encapsulating forms that interrupt, shape and utilise the natural realm are the facades of a hydrological imaginary. ‘A Hydrological Imaginary’ addresses this field of tension between the river and its artificial counterparts - canals, pipelines and human-made containments. The core of the thesis is a discussion of rivers, dams and water-based infrastructure that illustrates how environmentally engaged art discourses respond to the technological and sociocultural elements of water. This paper discusses the strategies of artists that work with bodies of water through photography, such as Australian artist David Stephenson and German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher along with my own photographic work. Multi-disciplinary artists such as UK artists Simon Starling and Rachel Whiteread are also discussed, along with the work of American artist Robert Smithson and American artist John Roloff. These conceptual art practices are to be connected to American writer David E. Nye and Scandinavian Professor Terje Tvedt’s ideas on the underlying histories of geopolitics, the technological sublime and Australian writer Martin Thomas’ ideas on the role of environmentalism in art. Thus, this thesis illustrates how art agitates the hydrological realm and contributes to the creation of new reflections, meanings and possibilities from the narratives of contained water, submerged histories and sociocultural attributes to the landscape. I have used my practice to bring context to these concepts around the ideas of contained nature and the movement of water in two solo exhibitions that featured video, photographic and kinetic sculptures created in a range of staged encounters with rivers in Eastern Australia. Alongside my previous work based on the Yangtze River in China in 2012, and work made within the Blue Mountains in 2012 – 2015 prior to commencing this Masters project, this thesis is a distillation of these seemingly disparate bodies of water. It is a narrative on historic systems, aesthetics and possibilities of the natural and the assisted movement of water.