It’s so easy to get lost in it all. Constant news updates, statistics published, even our steps being counted. An unrequested AI Overview slapped at the top of every search. It can be hard to find a way to slow down or reconnect. What I feel the exhibition ‘Shifting Waterscapes’ offers to us is a gateway towards this – to find ways of looking, thinking, and feeling more slowly.

The exhibition at Thelma Hulbert Gallery invites us to become submerged in diverse waterscapes: From Arun Sood’s multimedia investigation of his ancestral ties to the tidal island of Vallay, to Ellen Wiles’ sound story ‘Riverlandia’ showcasing a myriad of voices from the Porlock Vale, the gallery floats between watery perspectives. Far and near. Sounds and sights. Human and non-human. But the heart of this exhibition took place on the Otterhead Lakes Nature Reserve, a wetland habitat located in the Blackdown Hills. Sharing a veneration for the power of word and sound as multidisciplinary artists, writers, musicians, and academics at the University of Exeter, Wiles and Sood developed the groundwater of their collaboration here.

The unique geology of the Blackdown Hills allows rainfall to percolate and collect in its greensand layer, acting as an aquifer, before emerging as natural springs. Wiles explained that this phenomenon inspired the title of the collaboration ‘Springs and Seepages’, thinking about these waterflows as juxtaposing forces melded within the same cycle. The artists collaborated with East Devon based printmaker Emma Moloney and, of course, the Otterhead Lakes themselves, to create an immersive installation.

“We experience and value the world through our senses, so creating an immersive experience was important for people to connect to nature in an emotive way,” Wiles reflected.

Entering the first gallery through a forest of Moloney’s canvases, submerged in silt and printed with designs of flora native to the Blackdown Hills, we are encouraged to contemplate different paths. The adjoining space gleams with Wiles’ and Sood’s audio and film installation, framed by wood gnawed by beavers from the Otterhead Lakes as if sat behind a dam. The installation incorporates music and film recorded in situ, reflective poetic fragments and hydrophone recordings of the waterscape itself, creating a hybrid sonic soundscape. The improvisational nature of ‘Springs and Seepages’ was realised as the artists noticed that they experienced time very differently at the Otterhead Lakes – slower, but also more stretched out.

“We wanted to think about how time affects you when you’re in waterscapes, particularly in this place, where time can seem to morph.”

Wiles traced the history of the springs and seepages of the Blackdown Hills, explaining how they have shaped the landscape for thousands of years. Over time, people have found ways to harness this water: to power a medieval mill, to supply lakes for a Victorian estate, and today as a reservoir and nature reserve managed by Wessex Water. Although Otterhead Lakes is now under conservation management, it is intriguing to consider how this landscape might continue to evolve, and what its future holds for both its human and more-than-human communities.

This coalescence of past, present and future is carried throughout the exhibition by the waterscapes. Provokingly including a film by Sood titled “An dà shealladh”, we follow him to Vallay, an island now abandoned, as he traces fragments of cultural memory and its supersession by the tide. Not quite story, nor song, nor memory, the film evokes Sood’s familial biography and lived experiences growing up Scottish-Indian in Aberdeen, exploring the intersection of folk music, oral history, heritage, and place.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Robertson’s xylolibrarium overspills with invocations of place-based history; hand-made rag paper, photographs of historical paper-making sites, and a tiny paper heron. This piece acts as a sculptural portal into a fictional sound story created by Wiles, centred around a girl called Effie who works in a rag room at a paper mill on the banks of the River Exe. Wiles is keenly aware of the role of paper historically: in education, in documentation, in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. These artworks do not only offer us pieces of history, but different ways of feeling it.

These immersive ways of looking might be the most valuable. The UK has lost approximately 90% of its wetlands over the last century due to agricultural drainage, urban development, and pollution, despite being a vital habitat for supporting biodiversity. While it is true that no man ever steps in the same river twice, the work displayed in ‘Shifting Waterscapes’ reminds us that this is not an outlook of abandonment, but a voice of reflection, rest, and resilience.

You can keep up to date events for ‘Springs and Seepages’ on Ellen’s website

Read interview with Arun Sood by Marshwood Vale magazine

Watch ITV News story about Shifting Waterscapes

Article written by Indie Hansford, MA Curation student at the University of Exeter, volunteer at THG and resident of the Blackdown Hills.