Tamesis Unweaving

Anya Gleizer

How we treat our support systems reflects our relationships and the power imbalances that underwrite them. Who has the power to choose to pollute? Who is impacted by these decisions? Who has the power to shift this dynamic?

Pollution of the Thames River through raw sewage spillage, agricultural run-off, and micropollutants has reached record levels in the past two years. People from across Oxfordshire communities have reported feeling disempowerment, frustration and even grief. The art-science project Tamesis Unweaving was developed to help communities find pathways towards taking action, through citizen science, art, and activism.

Anya Gleizer is working with EarthWatch and Thames21 , mapping the River Thames into a wearable robe: the landscape, a patchwork of green and silver; the river, black hand–textured gathered silk. The top layer will become an embroidered, quilted map of our lived experience of the water.

Installed in the Lower Gallery during Marmalade Festival, Anya invites us to consider this vital source of life, to wear the robe and become Tamesis.

Through April and May, she will be working in space to develop the robe and engage people with the project.

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Tamesis, the original name of the river Thames (from which we get Thames + Isis, it’s local name here in Oxford) means dark waters.

Lately, the waters have been not dark but murky, hiding a story of corporate negligence, underinvestment and corruption that would take a public resource like our shared water source, and turn it into a soup of chemicals, raw sewage, run-off and garbage.

The pollution of Tamesis poses a very real health risk for us and future generations. Antibiotics, medications, fertility inhibitors (birth-control) and agricultural run-off all make their way into our water. When we turn on our tap, pour ourselves a cup of tea, the water we use and comsume comes from the Thames.

When we flush a toilet or do the washing up, that water returns to our water source, sometimes unprocessed and unfiltered. We cannot survive without water longer than 3 days. Close your eyes. Imagine your body, your circulatory system, not as a separate being making its way through this building, this city, unmoored from anything, but as a swirl in the stream, a diversion through which water courses on its way to the sea. This is not an abstract mental exercise. It is closer to the truth than a belief in our “separateness.”

What makes us feel the river as “out there”?

What noise buries its murmur through our veins?

What you are seeing is the Tamesis watershed from source to Reading.

This is a work in progress, eventually the robe will stretch to the sea (3 times longer than it is already) and every inch of it will be covered in community embroidery and quilting, sharing people’s memories and experiences of their rivers.

The artist, Anya Gleizer, began by walking the river from source to sea, painting it along the way. Then began workshops with primary and secondary schools. She has worked with River Action, EarthWatch and Thames21 to do citizen-science-meets-textile-art workshops, helping mobilize communities to find out for themselves what has been happening to our rivers – the Thames and its tributaries – as ThamesWater is allowed to pollute our commons for profit, and, very likely, get away with it. She invites you to find your place on this mapping – the map is divided into pieces – find your city or town, find your local fork of the river, introduce yourself. Then pick up the marker and draw or write your memories of this landscape, whatever is meaningful to you. Take the robe off the mannequin and try it on. Feel yourself as part of the watershed. Feel yourself at its source. We do not need to “join the community” – we are already participating in it. All we need to do is see our role, feel the river’s flow through us, and even for a moment while you are here, become Tamesis.