a: Real Contentment, International Artist Exchange Project: 2025

Truths and Tales of the River Medlock, is a body of work for publication and exhibition. The outcome is a series of images with texts and a map. It is concerned with the health of bodies of water and the consequences of private water ownership in the UK (and beyond). The work aims to alter perceptions of waterways framed in the UK as ‘owned bodies’ and raise awareness of their polluted conditions. Focusing on a neglected, heavily culverted river (The Medlock), it combines theories and practice-based processes including psychogeography and interpretive autoethnography (Denzin). It combines factual and fictitious writing, with illustration, set-making and mapping, as a dual-creative process.

The work was produced for Real Contentment, a project co-developed by the Manchester and Nanjing Cities of Literature and funded by a British Council International Collaboration Grant. It brought together six artists from Manchester and Nanjing, UNESCO Cities of Literature; a poet, illustrator and playwright from each city, tasked with making creative responses to waterways in both cities.

Guardian

Flood

Danu