Winter Caberet, RSA University of Reading,

Winter, 2025

Waterfold (2025),

Stories of Life Blue and Gold industrial metallic wallpaper, white emulsion, dowels and thread.

10000*530mm

The waterfall is an iconic symbol of ‘nature’ and water is an increasingly scarce and abused ‘resource’ (see research for more on this). 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. 

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 a colonial discourse.  The boulders are referred to as a grotto, though as a grotto it is somewhat lacking..