Skin of the River, 2023
at Battersea Bridge, London.
Cotton T-shirt fabric, Thames river mud stains, mudlark hemp rope
140 * 70cm
We are at the edge where what appears to be a solid landscape is actually unstable.The skin(embankment) once separated us from nature:
The Thames may have had no tides in the past.
It breathed flat and quiet.
The tide is a deep breath for the river today.
It surges twice a day.
London used to be a malaria marshland.
People built walls to cut off the river,
To survive and gain farm land.
But the skin(wall) did not stop in front of the body,
it wrapped the river in turn.
The unstable skin beats each other,
sometimes advancing and sometimes retreating.
Self-heals imperceptibly
The grey cloth was cut into the shape of the vest as I found it very convenient for extracting the clay. The stains left by mud are right where the belly should be.
This fabric is a tool for repeatedly extracting clay. Industrially produced textiles will be made into different widths according to different uses of making garment or curtains. I chose the cotton cloth designed for making garments and cut it to the size of the body and kept the leftovers in the pattern. Then hang it back to the wall of the river. The fabric, mud stains, and skin are often unnoticed corners of the landscape. But in the photo, they are moved to the middle and become a conspicuous existence.
Skin and cloth are both fragile elements that sometimes emerge from construction gaps.
Their fragile leftovers left transient traces,
Presenting a kind of ambiguous, anonymous body.
