about the artist
riverwork represents the personal practice of russell groves burden. currently, amongst other projects, he is the artist in residence for four year. duration of the lossenham project, a multidisciplinary, site-specific exploration of a private natural landscape in the high weald of west kent - the lossenham project
- for some poetic thought about the riverwork practice and its methodology - obscure cartographies
- a selected chronology of work that underpins the practice - wayfaring
- various smaller commissions - invites and commissions
- a few examples of archived imagery - image making
a workspace in flux
riverwork documents a selection of observations and materials gathered or created in practice. the practice might best be understood as a constellation of developing, poetic relationships; a sense-making activity that spans many years of research. unlike a archive or portfolio, riverwork is an active journal of words, images and sound. a digital sketchbook subject to adjustments, additions and erasures, an unfinished map of subjective connections derived from an explorative journey. within the topography of the practice, both enquiry and outcome are open to cross boundaries, the contents of project containers often evolving. boundary definitions may dissolve, entanglements and reconfigurations becoming thresholds to further investigation. primarily site-specific, the enquiry is routed in landscape and natural event, phenomena generally perceived from a goethean standpoint, inviting the objectivity of science to integrate with the artistic imagination and the spiritual, the perceiver regarded simply as a part of nature, witnessing nature who, moment by moment, is presented with an open invitation to peer through the surface fabric of things to apprehend a more luminous field of spaciousness.
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).
media and method
- interdisciplinary research
- writing and mapping
- sound recording and music
- still image and moving image
- sculpture and painting
- installation and assemblage
- collection and archive
- experimental method
- small press publication
riverwork's delivery
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.
text colour:
grey - italic quotations, project details, image titles
white - project titles, creative pieces, contextual links
lowercase type:
an experimental device postulated by bauhaus member herbert 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 herbert bayer’s unicase orthography in this practice aims to promote an open field of type that streams thought without imposed formality. this loosening facilitates a sense of self-similarity thoughout the work, easing notions of hierarchy and scale.
terminal punctuation:
the practice is a personal search for the gaps between our ordered apprehension of things and as such to use or not use punctuation at the end of a line remains unresolved. the compartmentalising of thought via the use of prescriptive visual signs is both useful to a work's intended meaning and, at the same time, limits the development of softer boundaries that aim to transmit a sense of unresolved flow, a stream of thought without conclusion. this added to the use of 'lowercase only' type further extends the written work toward a deeper sense of visual form.
© (1974-2021) all rights reserved
all written content, imagery, sound, film and design, (including website design) is the copyright of russell groves burden unless presented to be the work of a collaborating artist, or a literary citation with bibliographic reference.
info[at]riverwork.studio
