PLUVIUM

2024

Latin: Rain; rainfall.
Location: Thames Estuary · Cliffe Pools · Kent · England

This body of work engages with site-responsive materiality through the use of raw, unprocessed elements—clay, chalk, rust, ash, and soil—collected from the Thames Estuary. These materials, embedded with ecological, geological, and anthropogenic memory, become the primary agents of the work.

The pieces are not fixed but subject to transformation. Once assembled, they are exposed to the open air, allowing rain to operate as a co-creator. Rain acts not simply as a natural occurrence, but as a catalyst of entropic intervention—eroding, blending, and reconfiguring matter in ways that resist authorship. This performative process foregrounds the agency of weather and time, repositioning the work within a framework of interdependence and nonhuman authorship.

Clay and chalk situate the work within the deep-time strata of the Thames estuary’s geological narrative, while rust and ash invoke the industrial residues and burnt remains of human occupation. Soil, the connective tissue of all terrestrial systems, weaves these elements together, simultaneously marking cycles of fertility, degradation, and regeneration.

Pluvium proposes a form of practice that is not about representation, but entanglement. It calls into question the boundary between artist and environment, inviting the viewer to consider not what has been depicted, but what has been surrendered.