WHAT THE WATER REMEMBERS — 2025–26
PROJECT TYPE TO CONFIRM
Project introduction
A site responsive visual research project exploring how water, language and landscape can carry traces of memory, labour and overlooked histories.
ROLE
Artist / Visual Designer
YEAR
LOCATION
Wrexham, Wales
CONTEXT
Canal & River Trust
NearFuture Heritage Futures
MEDIUM
Photography, Typography ,Writing, Visual research
01 CONTEXT
A landscape carrying memory
The project began through a Canal & River Trust practice development programme around the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal World Heritage Site.
Moving through the landscape, I became interested not only in what could be seen, but in what remained less visible: labour, movement, memory and the lives that had passed through the canal.
The landscape held evidence.
The water seemed to carry something else.
02 RESEARCH
I kept returning to the water.
Buildings, bridges and machinery appeared to hold history in solid form. Water behaved differently. It reflected, distorted and carried everything through the site while retaining nothing permanently.
That contradiction became the starting point for the work.
03 / CONCEPT
Not as an archive.
As fragments.
NOTEBOOK / BLACKOUT POETRY
carried forgotten returned beneath remembered
PRINTED TESTS / EARLY LAYOUTS
DEVELOPMENT — PROCESS IMAGE
05 / DEVELOPMENT
How the work developed
Photographing the site, extracting language, testing reflection and translating the idea into form.
06 / MATERIAL
Testing surface, light and reflection
Print, transparency and mirrored type were tested as physical ways of letting language shift with the viewer and the water.
07 / THE WORK
The work
The final work brings photography and language together through reflection, distortion and installation.
08 / IN SITU — INSTALLATION VIEW
09 / REFLECTION
What the work revealed
The project shifted my practice from documenting a place toward building a visual language for what cannot be held in a conventional record. Water became both subject and method: reflective, unstable and capable of carrying many histories at once.
Credits
Canal & River Trust × Coventry University · NearFuture / WHS Practice Development · Wrexham, Wales · 2025–26