about riverwork

riverwork.studio presents examples of russell burden's creative practice; a uk based artist exploring aspects of new materialist thought, poietic diversity, ambient perception and material engagement, most often through the lens of hydrological, geological, biological and phenological processes. amongst other site specific undertakings russell holds a four year residency 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 range of media.

a work space in flux

riverwork.studio might be best understood as an entanglement of ideas slowly simplifying, an active journal or sketchbook, a sense-making tool for the artist, its mutable process helping to further a personal enquiry. the site pulls together fragments of research, artwork, collected materials, poetic, historical and phenomenological observations. unlike an archive of finalised projects, the work is left open to be contextually reconfigured as the enquiry moves.

for a visual chronology and diversity of practice - wayfaring
for various invites & commissions - invites and commissions
for a few examples of photographic work - image making

philosophy

the practice is delivered through a wide range of media that seeks to reveal the lived experience of unexpected synchronicities and serendipitous juxtapositions as they arrive unbidden. the temporal, the physical, the imagined and the real are realms left open to a flat ontological approach, the biotic and abiotic alike regarded as one vibrant materiality, natural phenomena 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 spontaneous, 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
content may be juxtaposed in non-linear way, the enquiry left open to cross both temporal and geographic boundaries.

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
case (noun): early 13c. 'what befalls one - a state of affairs' from old french 'cas' an event, a happening, a situation. postulated by bayer in his 1925 proposal for his 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)
in this practice: to promote an open field of type that streams thought without imposed formalities. to facilitate ontological flatness and a sense of self-similarity. to ease notions of hierarchy, polarity and scale. succinctly, the dissolving of capitalisation.

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 the idea aims to increase a sense of flow and aesthetic form.

key words
mystery, wonderment, atmospherics, poetics, poiesis, abiogenesis, biomineralisation, deep time, mineral evolution, extended mind, speculative realism, object oriented ontology, vital materialism, ecological post-humanism, anthropocene, (dis)enframement, deep green thought, ahimsa, existential reverence

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)
• keith dowman — spaciousness ((dzogchen now! books, 2014)
• 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)
• martin heidegger — the question concerning technology and other essays (garland publishing, inc. new york & london, 1977)

all rights reserved copyright notice: all written content, imagery, sound, film, artwork and website and graphic design unless - shown to be the work of a collaborating artist, a literary citation with bibliographic reference, an image in the public domain [ccø] - © russell burden (1974 - 2023) - info (at) riverwork (dot) studio