About this event

As the culmination of Laura Harrington’s Visiting Artist work with Radar, this event launched the publication You Cannot Step in the Same River Twice. The publication charts Harrington’s return to a decade-old project, Where are the wild ones?, an audio-visual opera developed in collaboration with Berlin based sound artist and composer Kaffe Matthews, which explored the migration of wild salmon along the River Tyne. As part of this project, Harrington and Matthews worked with children from three schools near the banks of the River Tyne and scientists from the Environment Agency North East to weave together stories, music and scientific data. Harrington’s publication, through transcribed conversation, letters and drawings, documents this return, reflecting on the significant changes seen within the river, arts and environmental policy in a ten-year period against a backdrop of overlapping human, animal and geological time scales. 

The roundtable discussion included contributions from project commissioner Laura Purseglove, currently a producer at Science Gallery, London, who was previously Producer of the Radar programme, and Professor Stephen Rice, a collaborator on the project, who is Professor of River Science, Geography and Environment at Loughborough University. 

Participants received a free copy of the publication.

The event marked the conclusion of the 2022/23 Ecological Thinking programme, a series of artist commissions and events exploring what creative and collaborative methodologies can bring to ecological study. 

About the panel

Laura Harrington is an artist and researcher operating between the interdisciplinary boundaries of art and environmental sciences. She lives and works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 2022 she completed her practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, researching artists’ fieldwork activities as a means to consider new ecological, spatial and material understandings. Her work explores the complex relations between humans and unstable/overlooked landscapes, often through cross-disciplinary research and co-production. Situated between art, science and philosophy her practice of film-making, installation, drawing, fieldwork and listening seeks to create works that centre on an idea of ‘upstream consciousness’, drawing on upland ecologies to think about various relations and connections. Recent exhibitions and residencies include EKO8 (Slovenia), MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK), Projections (Tyneside Cinema, UK), UNIDEE/Cittadellarte, (Biella, Italy), Hangmen Projects (Stockholm), HIAP (Helsinki International Arts Programme, Finland), Durham University (Leverhulme), Invisible Dust, UK, Woodhorn Museum, UK, BALTIC 39, UK, VARC, UK and AV Festival 12, UK.

Professor Stephen Rice is a Geographer interested in the processes at work in rivers and the interactions between sediment movement, river flows and river ecosystems. He is Professor of River Science, Geography and Environment at Loughborough University. His recent research has focused on the role of animals, including fish, in driving and conditioning land-shaping processes (like sediment erosion and deposition in rivers) using a combination of field investigations and experiments at Loughborough’s River Science Laboratory. Other work in the past has focused on how changes in riverbed sediments affect the quality of salmon habitat, how changing river morphology affects fish communities and how the shape and pattern of river networks affect freshwater biodiversity at catchment scales. He is a Geordie who was born close to the Tyne, whose love of rivers was born in Northumberland and who returns to the Tyne frequently.

Laura Purseglove is a Producer at Science Gallery, London. Her work focuses on research-led and participatory practices. Between 2018-2023 she led the Radar programme at Loughborough University. Recent freelance curatorial projects include a community garden project exploring scent in the context of neurological disorders, with UCL Public Art, and creative learning projects equipping gallery volunteers with curatorial expertise, with Modern Art Oxford. She was previously a Production Coordinator at Artangel. Laura holds an MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of Leicester and an MRes in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College.