about riverwork

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

implicitly encircling ecological thought, riverwork explores entanglements between scientific phenomena, artistic sensibility and spiritually. the practice is delivered through a wide variety of materials and media including: writing, photography, music, sound, film, painting, sculpture, installation and digital processes.

poetic passages about practice and methodology - obscure cartographies
a 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

the riverwork website was primarily designed as a tool to develop the practice, a depository of ideas documenting observations, collected materials and art works to be viewed as a constellation of developing poetic relationships or juxtapositions; a sense-making activity that spans many years of research.

unlike an archive of specific projects or a portfolio, the site is an active journal, a digital sketchbook subject to adjustments, additions or erasures. a journey that maps serendipitous moments and connections as it progresses, the enquiry never complete. rooted in landscape, water and natural event and site-specific work, phenomena is viewed from a goethean standpoint, inviting the objectivity of science to integrate with the artistic imagination; to gaze through the surface fabric of things and 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).

the practice incorporates the aesthetic concept of deep mapping and uses object oriented ontology to examine non-hierarchical and non-binary ways of seeing. the biotic and abiotic are viewed as a unified constellation of vibrant materiality, intra-active assemblages, states of mineral evolution.

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.

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© (1974-2022) 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