Living Downstream (2004)
Floor-based digital photographic artwork with accompanying text. The text is in the form of 3 ‘postcards’ sent from areas of the world where river pollution and flood are endemic.
Near the bridge over the Bishnumati River in the chill pre-dawn, a series of fires create small, flickering spaces in the encircling gloom. Dark shapes of men and water buffaloes strobe in and out of the light. Behind the fires, the narrow brick and pot-holed asphalt streets curve up toward Durbar Square and the old city of Kathmandu. In the far distance, white peaks catch the first rays of the sun, mist rising from falling glacial water. See the raised hand, the buffalo sinking to its knees, the glint of knives, pigs and dogs nosng through piles of offal spilling down the embankment. In the midst of this, a woman is drawing water at the stand-pipe; her children squat around her. The river retreats into itself, not wanting to see, not wanting to be seen, huddling into a small dark channel, mired in fear and death. A cool fog hovers, shifts, lifts slowly from the city. The sun stalks the scuttling, long-tailed vestiges of night, warm, catlike, across the bridge, where vendor
