Annie Wynne’s installation for the River Deep Mountain High exhibition found inspiration in the McClean Hydrometric Data collection held by the University Archives.
I Follow Rivers by Annie Wynne
Installation
“Water has been measured extensively. The thickness in feet of the Greenland ice shelf; the number of cubic kilometres of ocean water; the percentage humidity of a Dundee flat on a February evening, but what boundaries do these measurements truly perform? The requirement for ‘measuring’ is precisely the limit and as such the marking off of a definitive territory proves necessary. Materials isolated, contained, stabilised; slowed to the point of stillness and allocated place within already established systems of value. And yet water remains curiously nomadic, more often untraceable in its movements and indefinite in form. It is the “becoming” of water whose affects we are quick to name as it enters and leaves assemblages. To expand in freezing, to float as ice, to evaporate, boil, condense. Cumbersome articulations not of finite forms but of intensive process driven by difference and provoking material flows.
I approach this project then not as an attempt to fix through an apparatus of capture but as a mapping of flows that resists chronology and organisation. It is surface in motion, trickling towards new spaces through fissures and gaps beyond the limits of definitive boundaries and territories coded. Charged with potential, it moves and is moved; a body disturbed and distributed.”
Annie Wynne’s practice is largely concerned with the transformative energy attendant to life. Operating somewhere between dissipation and discovery, she is currently exploring conceptions of landscape, practice and mobility.
River Deep Mountain High was an exhibition in the University’s Lamb Gallery to mark the Year of Coast and Water curated by Archive Services. Artists, designers and creative writers were invited to respond to the University’s rich archive, museum and rare book collections on the themes of rivers, seas, coasts and mountains. Original photographs, journals, plans, models and specimens relating to whaling, the River Tay, the natural world and mountaineering inspired jewellery, artwork, sculpture, poetry and much more.