Throne
As part of my ongoing work on the river Wey, I'm building up a project about waste water and sewage treatment. I'm trying out a few different ideas - some of which will make it through, some of which will end up on the cutting-room floor.
I started by working out what was there and what it looked like, focusing on the waste water and sewage infrastructure but without any real idea of doing anything specific, visually. There was some idea of showing how this infrastructure is just there, part of our neighbourhoods, and sometimes just next door to where people live and work.
One of the ideas that came out of the initial work, and a talk by Helen Sear, was that the infrastructure is always hidden away, behind a fence, at a distance, behind a wall... so I could include these barriers within the images to give the sense of distance.
I sourced a "previously enjoyed" toilet to use as a prop. I looked at it for a few days, wondering if I should have been less "sustainable" and just bought a new one... before finally building up the courage to clean it.
The first set of toilet photos, though they are attention-grabbing, are a bit too unsubtle: they are pictures of a toilet rather than pictures about a toilet and it being in / out of place. The couple above are an attempt to move away from that.
There are a few other sources of images that should make it in - rubbings of drain covers / grilles and extracts from engineering documents. Also mapping from Thames Water (https://www.thameswater.co.uk/edm-map) and The Rivers Trust (https://theriverstrust.org/sewage-map).
Also includes Man Ray / Marcel Duchamp "Elevage de poussière" as a counterpoint to the LIDAR image - there is more to say about the comparison but it will most likely end up on the cutting-room floor.
