Walking with the Invisible
This project explores the course of the buried Taddle Creek in today’s Toronto. It encourages looking and listening to what cannot be immediately seen or heard —a lost piece of nature and Indigenous history in the city, retrieved through a multimedia installation. Through studying a hidden river, this project explores how humans have reshaped the natural environment of the city.
This practice-based research includes yearlong sensory geography and analysis of the experience of place. It aims to represent a hidden phenomenon, by capturing the trace of it on cyanotypes, walking the course of it as an experimental performance, and juxtaposing photos and sound to create a mental image. It depicts, not the river but the “absence” of it— to make a sense of longing—for the river and the sense of place it could create. This work is representing a present absence; a spatial memory of a lost landscape

I made cyanotypes which are eco-friendly and experimental-–searching for ways to make images, not only of the river but originally with the river and to bring the traces of the river to the project.

The traces are not completely under my control, the water controls them, so they have free, organic and diverse shapes. This method, from a posthumanist perspective, gives an agency to water, as a non-human natural element, to make arbitrary forms.

The images are contact prints––they are made by the actuality of the subject in contact with the cyanotype paper, developed by the sun and the water, at that place (Wychwood Park) and in that time; moreover, to reference map-making––blueprints of a space.