with this exhale comes the dreaming of winter

Walthamstow Marshes, 2023-2024


The sky, grey and heavy, falls like a sigh. The ground recalls the clouds and glimmers with the emerging water once again. Winter murmurs towards us, dark and soft, as our eyes begin to slowly close. The image slips, murky and wavering.





each moment a sigh: waterlogged plant through breath, 35mm photograph, 2024





Preface

This work is a quiet exhale, rippling across the surface of water and echoing through our dreaming. It represents a year of gentleness, co-emergence and collaboration with place, of daily interactions, offerings and gestures held in the blink of a shutter, the blur of an image and the hiss of a microphone. Of dissolving into the space between land and water, of moving, breathing, longing and dreaming with marshland. 

Here, long-form, slow, and durational gestures of staying, sounding and moving with marsh are imagined as acts of gentleness for this site, and the ritual of returning day after day to the marshland as a move towards a sensory, non-linear co-emergence with place, where human body and marsh breathe one another in, curling around each other in a boundless embrace: a co-becoming, an undulating process of knowing and unknowing.

Drifting somewhere between somatic gesture, performance with place and image-making, the work lingers between states like silt suspended in water. The camera rises and falls with breath, oscillating with the body as it shape-shifts with the marsh, trying to hold the unfixable, fluid and permeating and catch the most fleeting of gestures. Site-specific botanical film developers created from nettle and dandelion locate the image’s materiality in marshland and as the seasons shift and sunlight fades, the developer weakens, softening the image as it slips into the realm of the forgotten. Soaked in the marsh, the image glimmers and sighs into darkness as winter falls. 






A year of gentleness

Ephemeral and ungraspable as sunlight glimmering on the surface of the murky, amber water of the marsh, lingering long after the eyes softly close. Gentleness is a path trodden flat through reed beds that quietly leads us outside of the order of things(1). A soft threat and a murmured subversion of the accelerated temporalities and subsumptive forces of late capitalism, one that asks us to be open to the intimacies of the world(2), and to being transformed by them. An invitation to linger with a tiny plant glinting with frost, unfurling quietly in the morning sun. 


The transformative potentiality(3) of gentleness lives in these undefinable, constantly shifting uncertainties of the world: the pulsing quality of life that is felt in cold breeze kissing warm skin, mist rising from the marsh and gently entering the lungs on an inhale. In the image of earth resurfacing from water, etched and echoing on closed eyelids. 







gesture into forgetting, 35mm photograph with self timer, 2024







Staying with marshland and it’s slippery oscillation between states through the seasons, is to linger with these uncertainties and experience them in the (equally) fluctuating, sensing body: to feel the flux between earth and water beneath the feet and to tune into the vibrating emergence and receding, remembering and forgetting, of this sodden land. Here in this earthy, watery archive, our human chrononormativity (4) is glitched, queered (5) and turned in upon itself, flowing through our bodies on a deep, resonant breath. 

 
In this convergence of breath and water, time slips and bodies permeate one another in a transformative becoming, a spatiotemporal gentleness. On each inhale with the marsh, it flows through my lungs, the materialities of our bodies blurring and interecting. With it floods the vast anthropocentric entanglements that linger in the marsh water, suspended like silt - the absence or presence of water, fluctuating rainfall and the gradual warping of the seasons unfolding before and through us. Breathing with and through marsh is then an invitation to locate ourselves in this process, along with a potentiality (6) for a relationship with our damaged planet that emerges directly from the body and imagines what it might mean to tread lightly on the earth.


Here, I imagine the emergence and receding of water across the seasons as a single, elongated breath of the marsh. A breath that interweaves with my own as I respire the fluctuating states of the site in my own unfixed body. 







in a dream of water, a gesture to absence, 35mm photograph with self timer, 2024








The softening image

 
As winter swims in the near distance and the marsh exhales its water, darkness seeps, settling on our shoulders and soaking through the image. The memory of land and water caught between the blink of the shutter, swims and folds back upon itself. It flickers, wavers and sighs. 

The hardness of the camera’s eye punctuates a practice of gentleness. It is not a quiet companion on this liquidy journey of becoming with marsh. The camera recalls its own power, it echoes with every twist of the focus ring. It sticks to itself, fixed and unwavering in its gaze. Yet I have persistently carried it day after day, wading through water and long grass, its mechanisms gradually troubled by silt and moisture. Dials stick with detritus, cold morning mist condenses on its lens, the marsh slowly seeping in. I carry the camera close to my chest, my warm hands push-pulling with its cold body, looking for softness, inversion, a gentle disruption. 





spire, 35mm photograph with self timer, 2024




Turning the camera upon myself, I search for where the fluctuating intimacy of body and place might make slippery, the stickiness of image-making. Fleeting gestures performed and wavering at the field of focus, disappear out of frame, half-caught in the camera’s memory. Breath and smudged fingerprints cloud the lens and soften the eye. In place of a polarising assertion of power, I ask if the opening and closing of the shutter might be subverted and re-routed to become a gentle gesture towards place - a slow, quiet embrace in the falling darkness. 




   .
Breath fogs the lens and moves the body.
A heartbeat quietly echoing and bouncing back off the surface of the mirror.



The click and whir of the camera continues to soften under the cool, damp air as it creeps further into the mechanism. The film advances as daylight retreats, the image fading as we go on and on and on. Where staying with and returning to marshland is imagined as an act of temporal gentleness, what does it mean to do so with the camera in hand and how might the materiality of the image begin to echo this longevity? 

Botanical film developers situate the image’s materiality in the marshland. As the sun moves across the seasons and the plants fade into winter, the light in their bodies retreats, as does the image. It softens, murky and turbid(7) with the dormancy of winter, wavering on the edges of absence. Skies continue to darken, the sun sinking lower in the sky. The marsh begins its dreaming. 

















At the pause between inhale and exhale, the heartbeat seems to quieten, 
waiting for the soft gesture of release






























We linger here, the sun creeping lower in the sky, light glimmering at the edges of the marsh








A heart beating softly and slowly, 
an image drifting in and out of focus
























The memory of water swimming in our subconscious, slowly unearthing itself































































The eyes, soft and slow from sleep, open and close quietly

The dream swims in our vision for a moment and then evaporates


The shutter blinks its slow blink




























With a resonant sigh, the water coaxes itself out of the soft earth.  

Murky and wavering, we float,

unfurling in the place where light glimmers low and aching on the surface of the water  































water  ~   mirror
































Arms reach out into the soft darkness and fingers curl around stems


held only for a moment,
a wavering, oscillating embrace




















































The fading light reverberates through our bodies, and echoes out into the water


Soaked and slipping, we begin to soften, 
leaves and limbs folding in upon themselves and curling towards slumber



































Our image whispers, 
caught for a moment in silver
before swelling and rolling back into the darkness























Growing murky and unstable,
we fall into the place where land meets water 

and drift back into the dream  




































A water sound,
the sound of water
the sound of wind on water,
in long grass,
rattling through reed beds
the sound of my breath,
condensing in cold air and meeting the water’s surface































The mirror fogs, 
the film creeps on as light vanishes. 


The eyes heavy and clouded with silt 
limbs slow and soft from slumber





Grey clouds seep into silver, then drift, unfixed and darkening. 











\










Floating in the realm of forgetting, we sink into skies and fall again as rain






















The image swims and blurs

An eye filled with tears 
rolling back into the swamp









































Rain-soaked, our bodies bow and bend further towards the earth















Open palms and leaves reach towards the swelling flood 

a vanishing gesture 
a forgotten embrace 










































The last light glimmers on the amber water, wavering on the edges of our vision.

A heartbeat echoing softly off the surface of the mirror
























Citations 
[1] Daniel Fraser, A Gentle Remainder: Anne Dufourmantelle’s Power of Gentleness (2019)
[2] Rosi Braidotti,‘We’ May Be in This Together, but We Are Not All Human and We Are Not One and the Same (2020)
[3] Anne Dufourmantelle, The Power of Gentleness (2018)
[4] Sonia Fernández Pan, Thinking with water, thinking in waves (2023)
[5] Astrida Neimanis, Water as a Planetary Archive of Feeling: Queer Ecologies and Reparative Readings for the Anthropocene (2017)
[6] Anne Dufourmantelle, The Power of Gentleness (2018)
[7] Bridget Crone, Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (2022)


Acknowledgements
With immense gratitude to Ros Gray, Jol Thoms, Elly Clarke and the 2023-24 MA Art & Ecology cohort for the support, guidance and knowledge-sharing during this process. And to Ivan Coleman and David Ramkalawon for the time, patience and knowledge in all things analogue. To Sarah Harvey, Ian Otway, Esme Harvey-Otway, Rosie Reed Gold, Laura Brady, Kate Boardman, Rose Riley, Emma Price, Sara Ortolani, Vanita Lea Falco, Millicent Hawk, Nathan Anthony and Rhys Evans for the care, love and support during this process. And finally to Gabriele Parussini, for the time shared together on this earth.




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The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

All Rights Reserved by Respective Authors, 2024.