about riverwork
riverwork.studio presents examples of russell burden's creative practice; a uk based artist exploring aspects of new materialist thought, poiesis and ambient reception, mainly through the lens of hydrological, geological and biological objects and processes. amongst other site specific work russell is completing his fifth year as artist in residence for the lossenham project - exploring the materiality of a discrete wetland landscape in the high weald of kent. during 2024/25 a short film uncertain boundaries: a lossenham residency was completed which can be viewed here. russell is currently engaged in writing drift: emergent dialogues with place and praxis - an introspective journal, and creating work for a show in 2026, a collaboration with melvyn evans for rye art gallery in east sussex.
a work space in flux
riverwork might be best understood as a series of entwined investigations. that functions as an active tool online for the artist to navigate a body of work and further the 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 added to, removed or rearranged as the enquiry evolves.
for a visual chronology and diversity of practice - wayfaring
for various invites & commissions - tributaries
for a few examples of photographic work - image making
philosophy
the practice is delivered through a wide range of media that seeks to reveal unexpected synchronicities and serendipitous juxtapositions as they arrive unbidden. the temporal, the material, the imaginal and 'the real' are held to be open, non-hierarchal concepts - the biotic and abiotic regarded as a continuous vibrant materiality. as such, 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 spontaneous, spacious, luminous fields of meaning.
'by being part of, yet different from technology, art leads us into the open: a place of unshieldedness to the forces of poiesis flowing into one another. (ref: warwick mules, heidegger, nature philosophy and art as poietic event. transformations, issue #21, 2012)
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 [editor] unit one: the modern movement in english painting, sculpture, and architecture. london: cassell, 1934)
riverwork's delivery
mutable content:
content layouts may be non-chronological, 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: the promotion of an open field of type that streams thought without imposed formality. to facilitate a sense of ontological flatness and self-similarity. to ease notions of hierarchy, polarity and scale. an absence of capitalisation.
key words
indeterminacy, happenstance, mystery, wonderment, atmospherics, poetics, poiesis, abiogenesis, biomineralisation, deep time, mineral evolution, extended mind, vital materialism, ecological post-humanism, anthropocene, [dis]enframement, deep green thought, ahimsa, existential reverence. spaciousness.
key texts
• karen barrad — meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (duke university press books, 2007)
• jane bennett — vibrant matter: a political ecology of things (duke university press books, 2010)
• gernot böhme — the aesthetics of atmospheres (routledge, london 2018)
• mark bonta and john protevi — deleuze and geophilosophy (edinburgh university press, 2004)
• jeffrey jerome cohen — stone: an ecology of the inhuman (university of minnesota press, 2015)
• keith dowman — spaciousness ((dzogchen now! books, 2014)
• graham harman — object-oriented ontology: a new theory of everything (pelican books, 2018)
• martin heidegger — the question concerning technology and other essays (garland publishing, inc. new york & london, 1977)
• david lindsay — other grounds breaking free of the correlationist circle (punctum books, 2016)
• lambros malafouris — how things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement (the mit press, 2013)
• quentin meillassoux — after finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency (continuum, 2008)
• timothy morton — realist magic: objects, ontology, causality (open humanities press, 2013)
• timothy morton — ecology without nature (harvard university press, 2009)
copyright notice: all written content, imagery, sound, film, artwork, graphic & website design unless: shown to be the work of a collaborating artist, a literary citation with bibliographic reference, an image in the public domain [ccø] - © all rights reserved, russell burden (1974 - 2025)
info (at) riverwork (dot) studio
