THE ENTANGLED MATERIALITY OF WATER
This research-creation project explores the entangled relationships between body, garments, and water, approached as a fluid imprint embedded in everyday life. It considers the connections between human and non-human systems, understanding bodies of water as both life-sustaining forces and fragile infrastructures shaped by ecological, political, and industrial pressures.
At the core of my practice is a tactile and repetitive engagement with cloth. Through slow hand stitching, gathering, and embroidery, I embed emotional and bodily experiences into material. These gestures function as both a meditative process and a form of repair, where making becomes a way of mending the self while attending to broader systems of care and vulnerability. The resulting surfaces invite close looking and evoke a tactile desire, encouraging viewers to physically and sensorially connect with the work.
Water shapes material at every level, from the formation of fibres to textile production, and in the ways garments are worn, altered, and inhabited by the body. Cloth carries traces of water, labour, and use, embedding personal and collective histories within broader ecological and industrial networks. I often imagine fabric as holding the memory of water: the water required to grow fibres, to dye and process textiles, and the moisture and heat of the body that gradually reshape garments into second skins.
The work reflects on the physicality of water, its weight, movement, and force and its shifting states between fluidity and resistance. Water can be a soft, permeable substance, yet also an impenetrable surface or a destructive force. This duality informs my thinking of water as a living, breathing entity in constant transformation. It sustains life while simultaneously absorbing the consequences of extraction, pollution, and globalised consumerist cycles. In this sense, water becomes a wounded body, marked by chemical damage, microfibres, and the residue of industrial production.
The work emerges from an ongoing reflection on change, transformation, and passage through time both within the body and across environments. Just as landscapes evolve through cycles of erosion and growth, the body shifts through lived experience, and garments bear the marks of this movement. Through abstraction, layered textures, and material accumulation, I explore these trajectories as interconnected processes.
Through this lens, the project traces the intertwined pathways of water and fibre across global systems of production and exchange. It seeks to give form to their shared, unstable materiality and to the invisible networks that sustain life while simultaneously exposing their vulnerability. By foregrounding these entanglements, the work proposes cloth as a site where ecological, bodily, and political narratives converge.
