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.
Mating Pond Skaters on River Cong.
“I am particularly drawn to how memory settles into place and season, held within natural rhythms and revealed as shifting echoes over time.”
My LifeWays practice approaches the river as a place of dwelling, where life gathers along its edges and water and land meet along the riverbanks.
Over twelve months I will trace the LifeWays of River Cong.
I will listen to its rhythms, sketch its textures and explore changing colours, witnessing the different ways light, weather, movement and memory gather along its banks.
A year of living with the river's stories.
Reflection is both image and interruption.
The work emerging from this practice, including photography, moving image, poetic prose, watercolour and sound, explores 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 at anna7king@gmail.com.
Fungi on dead wood: a natural form of renewal, where nothing is wasted and everything finds its way back into the forest.