Holding Water – A New Moving Image Commission with Forth2O and Hydro Nation (Exploring water, research, and collaboration through a new lens-based moving image project, developed during my residency at the University of Stirling).
Over the past six months, my Artist in Residence position at the University of Stirling has been focused on research, conversation, and building relationships across the University’s water research networks – and I’ve been in awe of what has been at my fingertips during this time!
It reminded me of something I hadn’t realised I was missing in my work sphere – the importance of diverse voices, research, and meaningful knowledge exchange in practice and process.
Living on the Isle of Lewis over the past year and a half has given me the gift of perspective. The needed time and space to sit with the rumbles and ripples in my own life/practice whilst being surrounded by bodies of water. I once heard someone describe the island as a submarine – which can feel pretty apt sometimes. Here, you feel both held within and set apart by water – submerged in it, shaped by it.
My residency at Stirling has offered something complementary: dialogue, exchange, and new research perspectives. Learning alongside people’s knowledge and experiences of ecology, water, and community feels especially important at a time of increasing polycrisis – where ecological, political, and social systems are all under strain at once, each shaping and intensifying the other (Eric Helleiner, 2024).
I can sense there is a lot of anxiety around all this; how we respond to water and land, raising questions and differing opinions have emerged in land-based pracices, who has access to it, whose knowledge counts, and who has the right to talk about it. It’s interesting this is happening in a time of heightened polarisation within the polycrisis – there’s a sense of urgency in our safety structures, our bodies and our surroundings.
Earlier this year, I returned home to South Africa for the first time in two years. Being back there – in a country still living through the ongoing realities of its apartheid past and the ruptures it caused – reminded me how much my practice is shaped by this history and its dismantling: learning to sit with complexity and witnessing resilience in the face of crisis. South Africa is a nation persistent, diverse, and actively negotiating change. This clarified something for me: my work isn’t just about sustainability or landscape, but about relationships and transitions – about how we live alongside one another, and within systems that both sustain and fail us. In many ways, it is a desire to find moments of connection, resilience, and stability amongst the mess of it all.
It feels fitting, then, that this residency has led me to water and moving image – a moment of fluidity, to move within and along the bodies of water that hold us.
So, I’m excited to share that this initial period of research has led to a newly funded moving image commission, which I will be developing in the second half of my residency.
This new commission is funded by Forth2O – a collaborative project funded by UK Research and Innovation, the ESRC, AHRC, and Innovate UK. It will be led myself and the Art Collection team, with mentorship support from LUX Scotland and research support from Hydro Nation.
The project will result in a new artists’ moving image film, with early iterations presented in Scotland and Switzerland (Verzasca Foto) in Autumn 2026, and a final screening in Scotland planned for 2027. It emerges from Stirling’s Art and Science theme, which centres on water – how it’s studied, recorded, understood, and lived alongside.
How did this commission emerge? Well, during my residency, I’ve been learning about how water is monitored, measured, and protected, and the critical role this research plays in shaping environmental futures.
What fascinates me most is the link between desire and urgency felt between artistic and scientific practices. In both, we aim to record, capture, and translate our findings – trying to communicate what matters to us. Where they differ is how that knowledge is experienced, felt, or translated.
This project asks, what does it mean to create an artistic response within climate research rather than translating the science directly. I’ll be exploring how moving image can create an embodied and sensory entry point — allowing audiences to encounter water not only as data, but as something embodied, relational, fluid, and constantly in motion.
For this reason, I’m working with 16mm film – hand-processing (some of it) and physically pulling the film through the camera. I’ll be working with more-than-human elements within the Forth river catchment areas to process, develop, and wash parts of the film itself, letting the water actively shape its own representation.
The film will include conversations with researchers alongside my own analogue and sustainable filmmaking techniques, responding intuitively to the environments and questions that emerge.
Alongside the moving image work, I’ll also be developing workshops and public presentations, creating spaces for dialogue and cross-pollination between art and science. It feels increasingly clear that if we are to move through these crises, we have to work together — across knowledge systems, perspectives, and practices — and be willing to share, collaborate, and learn from one another.
Thank you to the University of Stirling, Forth2O, Hydro Nation, and LUX Scotland for making this film possible as well as an amazing team working with me from the Art Collection.
I’ll be announcing some great collaborators who will be working with me on the film very soon, and I’m excited to share its development over the coming months.
Thanks for reading,
Jess x
