An Altered River (Altered Book)
This altered book responds to the River Tame in north Birmingham, a highly urbanised and frequently disregarded waterway. The works reconfigure the entanglement of nature and infrastructure along the river, tracing its layered histories and persistent presence beneath modern development. In attending to the Tame, I am also attentive to its quiet exclusion from dominant pastoral narratives of English rivers - a subtle politics of visibility in which industrial waterways are neglected both materially and imaginatively.
The book used was formerly titled Rivers of England and Wales which I have re-named An Altered River. In now had 29 altered pages. By intervening in a publication that overlooked the Tame, I enact a form of repair through re-narration. The book is written as if by the river itself: a meandering, non-linear voice that attempts to comprehend the shifting world above. Its voice emerges from the repurposed language of the original book, as words and phrases are lifted and re-layered in place.It reads like water thinks.
The work functions as a small act of ritual attention,
reconfiguring a disregarded landscape as a site of reverence and pilgrimage.
