WaterFold, RSA Winter Caberet 2025

The fold, Installation View, and close up, Wallpaper and white emulsion, dowels eyelet screws and strong black thread

This piece came about through a combination of Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice and Gilles Deleuze’s Fold.  Deleuze writes about the ‘pleats of matter’ and ‘folds of the soul’ suggesting that the world, space, time everything is composed of a single continuous material.  I took some stills from the film of water fountains and pieced these together to make a conceptual waterfall.  Then using roll of blue and brown wallpaper as the fall I poured and painted on white emulsion letting the paper unravel and fold in on itself. Some of these I left to stick to eachother to maintain the form, the three folds in the upper part formed with the help of dowel and thread. 

The stills from Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice:

Still frames from Kenneth Anger’s Eaux D’ Artifice which was a sequel to his Feaux D’ Artifice. It films a small lady running through gardens of the Villa D’Este which flow with water fountains and falls in Italy. The effect is of baroque excess and was conceived as semi-erotic.  The first shows the sillouette of a lady dressed with an ostrich feather headdress; the last the elaborate calligraphy to mark the end of the film. 

Mock up of Waterfold in situ in Reading University grounds

A mock up of the piece where the boulders are, I have featured the scaffold which points directly to the concept of nature as construct.  The grounds were arranged by the Marquise of Blandford and so feeds into much of the discourse previously discussed.  The boulders are referred to as a grotto, though as a grotto it is somewhat lacking..