Let it be Water is based on the ecological impacts of the management and maintenance of the River Thames, interrogating its water condition and quality throughout history. Rivers define humanity with early settlements being chosen based on their elevation and the location of rivers for trade, irrigation, and agriculture in ‘fertile floodplains’. Here, rivers become a source of ‘life’.

The installation explores the reciprocal relationship between water and the human body where the Thames has shaped London but civilians also ‘shape the river’¹ in turn. Human settlements throughout history have worked with or against waterscapes² and I question how the Thames has been instrumentalised in the past. The installation interrogates the multitude of ecological histories from the origins of the Thames to the present day. The installation is inspired by Allen David’s ‘Glass Fountain’ in Aldermanbury. Similarly to this precedent, water flows from a pool to inside the ducts through a tube, referencing free-flowing rivers being sanitised through industrial objects. The video continues this idea by combining the image of the moving river with the sounds of the natural and industrial processes it undergoes to produce sanitised, ‘good’ water for human use.³ This project could be interpreted as calling for processes where a river can more freely flow in its ‘first nature’⁴ state, and thus ‘let it be water.’