water as memory: notes from the field

Behind the Scenes of Ripples (Czech Republic, 2023)

Before the harvest, the lake is drained. Gates are opened. Water, once held, is released into a nearby stream—redirected like breath, like history. The fish, unaware of ritual or tradition, begin to gather and thrash in the shallows. It is a centuries-old practice, this drawing down. The catch is reserved for the Advent season, to nourish bodies before winter sets in.

I wasn’t meant to witness it. The date had changed, and no one had told us. But the fog that morning was unusually thick, and in its quiet I felt the pull to the lake. There, in place of the stillness that the lake brought on mornings after leaving my studio to the kitchen for coffee, was a flurry of movement: trucks, workers, nets in hand. I ran back to the studio for my camera, calling out to the others at ArtMill. When no one stirred, I returned to the lake alone.

Through my lens, I watched the quiet preparation, the fishermen, nets in hand forming a circle. And once the water was agitated, scales flashed and bodies collided. It was as if the water itself was remembering. As if what had once been hidden in its depths had risen to the surface.

In that moment, I no longer saw fish. I saw people—displaced, gasping, pulled from all they knew.

What began as a study of a cultural and ecological ritual transformed into a meditation on rupture, migration, and resilience. The harvest became a mirror. Just days before, the headlines had shifted my attention to another event—one steeped in collective pain, political force, and a long history of capture. The parallels came uninvited. But once seen, they could not be unseen.

And so, Ripples was born—not as a linear narrative, but as a layered response. A convergence of my years in water infrastructure and the ancestral memory held in lakes, rivers, and seas. You can trace it in the textures of the images, in the fragments of text. It is a visual reckoning. A record of breath held and then released.

When the lake is drawn down, the carp become visible in the shallow waters. The fish crowd into close proximity in a common struggle for breath.