about riverwork

riverwork.studio represents the creative practice of russell burden, a research based artist centred in the uk, currently exploring aspects of speculative realism, ambient poieses and perception, vital materialism, material engagement and extended mind theory - most often through the lens of hydrological, geological and biological objects and processes. amongst other engagements russell is artist in residence for the lossenham project, creating responses to a discrete wetland landscape in the high weald of kent. the lossenham project

the practice is delivered through a wide spread of media - writing, photography, sound, film, painting, sculpture, installation, digital process, collection and assemblage.

a work space in flux

riverwork.studio might be best viewed as an online depository of ideas, a site that pulls together aspects of research, artwork, collected materials, poetic and phenomenological observations. unlike an archive of finished projects or a promotional portfolio, much of the work on the site is subject to alteration as the practice evolves. the site acts as an active journal or sketchbook, a sense-making tool for the artist, its mutable qualities helping to further the enquiry.

for a selected chronology behind the practice - wayfaring
for various small commissions - invites and commissions
for a few examples of photographic work - image making

philosophy

riverwork represents a personal journey, an enquiry of unexpected synchronicities and serendipitous juxtapositions. It explores aspects of the material turn - matter mattering, the extended mind, and material engagement. the endless moment unfolding through the practice of watchful quietude.

the practice explores the biotic and abiotic alike as expressions of one vibrant materiality. natural phenomena are viewed from a goethean standpoint, inviting the objectivity of science to integrate with artistic imagination; the human instrument gazing through the surface fabric of things to apprehend more spacious, luminous fields of meaning.

paul nash, in the landscape of 1933, phrased the chemistry of his personal search thus... ‘last summer i walked in a field near avebury where two monoliths stand up sixteen feet high, miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, remnants of an avenue of stones which led to the great circle. a mile away, a green pyramid casts a gigantic shadow. in the hedge, at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following the sun. in my art i would solve such an equation’ (ref: herbert read, 1934).

riverwork's delivery

mutable content
as both enquiry and outcome are left open to cross boundaries the content of a section open to hold new or previously archived content.

viewing the work
although device responsive, this site is best viewed on a desktop monitor for both image detail and the layout of written work.

lowercase type
postulated by bayer in his 1925 proposal for a universal typeface: 'why should we write and print in two alphabets? both a large sign and a small sign are not necessary to identify a single sound. we do not speak in a capital 'a' and a small 'a'. a single alphabet gives us practically the same result as the mixture of upper and lower case letters...' (herbert bayer - bauhaus, 1919 - 1928, p.147).
the adoption of bauhaus member herbert bayer’s unicase orthography in this practice aims to promote an open field of type that streams thought without imposed formalities. this loosening facilitates a sense of self-similarity throughout the work, easing notions of hierarchy, polarity and scale.

punctuation
some of the poetic writing within the practice is purposefully composed to avoid or minimise punctuation. in addition to the use of 'lowercase only' type this idea aims to increase a sense of flow and aesthetic form.

key words
atmospheres, anthropocene, abiogenesis, biomineralisation, deep-time, hylozoism, poetics

key texts
• gernot böhme — the aesthetics of atmospheres (routledge, london 2018)
• graham harman — object-oriented ontology: a new theory of everything (pelican books, 2018)
• david lindsay — other grounds breaking free of the correlationist circle (punctum books, 2016)
• jeffrey jerome cohen — stone: an ecology of the inhuman (university of minnesota press, 2015)
• lambros malafouris — how things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement (the mit press, 2013)
• timothy morton — realist magic: objects, ontology, causality (open humanities press, 2013)
• jane bennett — vibrant matter: a political ecology of things (duke university press books, 2010)
• timothy morton — ecology without nature (harvard university press, 2009)
• quentin meillassoux — after finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency (continuum, 2008)
• karen barrad — meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (duke university press books, 2007)
• mark bonta and john protevi — deleuze and geophilosophy (edinburgh university press, 2004)

© (1974-2023) all rights reserved
all written content, imagery, sound, film and design, (including website design) is the copyright of russell burden unless presented to be the work of a collaborating artist, or a literary citation with bibliographic reference.

info[at] riverwork.studio