Where water falls

Where Water Falls was a duo exhibition with Ren Gregorcic at AIRspace Projects in Sydney, featuring new research-led works exploring the movement and circulation of water through hydraulic infrastructures in the urban environment.

Using projected video, Jessye’s work A Hydrous Place offers an exploration of human connection to a body of water marked by a history of marginalisation and ecological loss. The work responds to a section of the Moonee Ponds Creek, a waterway that traverses Melbourne’s northwestern suburbs and has undergone extensive modification across its lower floodplain. Altered, realigned and concreted to accommodate freeway and drainage works, the creek is a hybrid space, a heightened composite of nature and artifice that reflects both historical attitudes toward the natural world and the effects of increased urbanisation. It touches on the idea of a landscape becoming unfamiliar, and how a body (the artist’s body) might relate to both the constructed human-made overlays of the site, and the natural systems that persevere and permeate, despite the odds.

Ren’s dual screen-based work Motion in Division responds to the nature of simulation methods used to model and manage urban water systems, and the relationship between the structure of these models and concrete hydrological infrastructure. The design and engineering of urban concrete hydrological systems are informed by computational models and simulations that describe how drains and water channels should function relative to the mechanics of water to achieve a desired result (i.e. management of water runoff). However, a misalignment can occur between modelling systems, which often assume that concrete objects are neutral and non-reactive conduits, and the way that concrete objects act and behave as a complex physical entity subject to multiple forces over long periods of time.

The exhibition also included a collaborative expanded publication, which comprised a series of individual pages pinned to the wall, featuring imagery that stemmed out of the artists’ research and field work for Where Water Falls.

The exhibition took place from Friday 7 May-Sunday 23 May 2021.

The artists would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose land and waters their projects took place, including the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and the Ngunnawal, Ngambri and Ngarig people.