Shifting Fragments examines the River Thames as a site where urban systems deposit what they seek to remove. Long used as a receptacle for sewage, waste, and discarded matter, the river operates as an infrastructural margin where materials accumulate, erode, and resurface. The project draws on Ivan Illich’s H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness and Françoise Vergès’ Making the World Clean, which describe modern cleanliness as a technical and political process dependent on displacement rather than disappearance.¹²

Working along a stretch of the Thames riverbed in Barnes, the artist collects fragments—pottery, glass, metal, clay pipes, and clam shells—and embeds them into newly formed clay vessels filled with river water. Pressed together by silt and time, these materials appear indistinguishable when found; fired within ceramic forms, they re-emerge as layered records of use, discard, and circulation. The firing process burns away ingrained mud, not as restoration but as exposure, revealing histories that had remained submerged.

A glaze made from crushed shells of the invasive Asian clam—fired and transformed into calcium oxide—is applied around the fragments before a final firing. The resulting vessels hold Thames water that appears visibly clear yet carries unseen contamination, foregrounding the paradox of urban purity.

By holding displaced materials together temporarily, the vessels interrupt cycles of removal, accumulation, and dispersal. Rather than proposing resolution, Shifting Fragments asks what it means to hold what a city attempts to forget, and how attending to such residues might unsettle the illusion of managed urban cleanliness.