Home: A Year at River Cong
This project is a site-rooted extension of my LifeWays practice.
It is a journey through a single landscape, as it shifts and changes across the seasons.
Ecology, at its root, means home.
Ecology is often described as the study of relationships between living things and their environment. Rooted in the Greek oikos, meaning home, and logy, meaning knowledge and reflection, it can be understood as a way of knowing our place within a shared dwelling on Earth. The term holds the vast and the minute together; from the smallest organisms to the great movements of ocean and land. (ref. 1).
Mating Pond Skaters on River Cong.
A living field of relationships, unfolding across every scale.
A Year at River Cong is a study of how life exists within a shared place; an environment I refer to as Home.
While the term ecology (home) was named in the 19th century, the understanding it points to is far older. Across indigenous and early earth-based traditions, land is held as home; alive with presence, relationship, and memory.
LifeWays: A Year at River Cong follows this older knowing.
“I am particularly drawn to how memory settles into place and season, held within natural rhythms and revealed as shifting echoes over time.”
Reflection is both image and interruption.
My LifeWays practice approaches the river as a place of dwelling, where life gathers along its edges; where water and land meet along the riverbanks.
For twelve months I will trace the LifeWays of River Cong.
I will listen to its rhythms, sketch its textures and explore changing colours as I witness the different ways light, weather, movement and memory gather along its banks.
A year of living with the river’s stories.
The work gathered from this practice (photography, moving image, poetic prose, watercolour shades) focuses on reflection: the river as a moving mirror in which trees and sky are refracted through movement and colour.
Working at dawn, in seasonal light, and at dusk, I am drawn to transitional moments when forms loosen and boundaries soften, when the surface begins to disclose layered traces of memory otherwise unseen.
Reflection becomes both image and way of knowing.
Alongside this practice, I spend time listening to the wider life of the river: its ecological health, its histories, and the people who live in relationship with it.
Through conversations, local knowledge and sustained observation, this work explores how human experience settles into place and reveals itself within the natural world.
If you live near the River Cong and would like to share stories, knowledge or reflections, I would love to hear from you anna7king@gmail.com
Ref. 1: British Ecological Society
Fungi on dead wood: a natural form of renewal, where nothing is wasted and everything finds its way back into the forest.