about riverwork

riverwork represents the personal practice of russell groves burden.  currently, he is the artist in residence for the four year duration of the lossenham project, creating responses to a private landscape in the high weald of west kent - the lossenham project

the practice explores interconnections between scientific phenomena, artistic sensibility and spiritually through writing and photography, music, sound and film, painting, sculpture and installation, digital design and media.

: : poetic passages 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
: : examples of archived photography - image making

a work space in flux

primarily for the the artist's use, riverwork is an online depository of ideas. it documents a selection of observations and collected materials and might best be understood as a constellation of developing poetic relationships, a sense-making activity spanning many years of research. unlike a archive of projects or a portfolio the site may be better viewed as an active journal or a digital sketchbook, subject to adjustments, additions and erasures. an unfinished map of connections derived from an explorative journey. the enquiry, routed in landscape and natural event naturally develops site specific work. phenomena is perceived from a goethean standpoint, inviting the objectivity of science to integrate with the artistic imagination and be open to spiritual import. the perceiver is regarded as nature, witnessing nature and moment by moment, presented with an open invitation to peer through the surface fabric of things and apprehend a more luminous or spaciousness field 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, pages may evolve, gathering together media from differing places, years or even decades.

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 lines 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 the unresolved. this added to the use of 'lowercase only' type further extends the written work toward a deeper sense of visual form in which all objects are viewed equally.

© (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