Field Study
Walking the creek and river, visiting bays and shorelines, observing weather and tide, recording sound, gathering permitted material, and learning the ecology of the watershed.
ESTUARY / 2026-27
Working Framework
Estuary is an artist-led research and studio practice unfolding across a year. Situated along Nishisakawick Creek and the Delaware watershed, it follows water as ecosystem, medium, body, livelihood, boundary, archive, and keeper of time.
The work moves between shoreline observation, reading, mapping, material experiment, sound, ritual, the personal web, and the body. Knowledge takes form in objects, images, recordings, writing, performances, and pages within Deep Time Lab.
Water, time, technology, gender, domestic space, and artistic practice remain in contact here. The work gathers through sustained encounter and carries its questions forward as it goes.
THE INQUIRY
River & Sea
Estuary attends to the places where waters meet and alter one another: river and ocean, freshwater and saltwater, body and weather, household and network, myth and material, inherited time and lived time.
Deep Time appears through sediment, tides, erosion, animal life cycles, blood, lunar rhythm, geological scale, and the accumulation of handmade work. Cyberfeminism appears through the body’s relationship to technology, domestic space, labor, illness, reproduction, access, publishing, and self-authored worlds. The Internet Bedroom provides a living interface for collecting, linking, learning, transmitting, and making a world from available materials.
Ritual theater carries research into action. A gesture, score, costume, spoken text, or performed encounter can hold knowledge differently from an essay or map. Art practice becomes an expression of Deep Time when the work bears the duration, pressure, repetition, and accumulated relations that made it.
QUESTIONS CARRIED INTO THE WORK
Open Questions
How does a watershed become perceptible through the body?
What does water know about boundary, permeability, contamination, care, and relation?
How do tides, moon cycles, menstruation, and planetary movement create forms of time that can be felt as well as measured?
What kinds of knowledge live in bedrooms, kitchens, message boards, personal websites, field notebooks, and handmade archives?
How can ritual theater make research experiential, collective, and strange?
What forms can emerge when ecological study, mythic study, cyberfeminist thought, and material practice remain in conversation?
WAYS OF WORKING
Methods
Research / Close Reading
Reading scientific, historical, mythological, astrological, feminist, and vernacular sources. Following citations, images, contradictions, and returning questions.
Material Experiment
Working with fiber, netting, mesh, knotting, weaving, twining, plaiting, paper pulp, slurry, deposition, joining, permeability, photographic process, drawing, and found material.
Internet Bedroom
Building Deep Time Lab as an accumulating personal web: a living interface for research, image, correspondence, reference, play, memory, and worldbuilding.
Ritual Theater
Developing gestures, scores, scripts, installations, recordings, adornments, and participatory situations that give research a body and a duration.
Blood Time / Return
Attending to menstruation, illness, sensation, lunar rhythm, rest, repetition, and the body’s record of passage. Revisiting sites, materials, questions, and earlier work.
WHAT THE PRACTICE DEVELOPS
Capacities
- Estuarine literacyUnderstanding tides, freshwater flow, salinity gradients, stratification, sediment, habitats, food webs, erosion, deposition, and rates of change.
- Watershed relationTracing Nishisakawick Creek through the Delaware River, Delaware Estuary, Delaware Bay, Atlantic Ocean, and world ocean.
- Species knowledgeLearning enough about blue crabs and Atlantic horseshoe crabs that symbolic thinking remains accountable to actual lives.
- Material vocabularyWorking with structure, permeability, accumulation, and transformation through fiber, pulp, image, sound, and found material.
- Cartographic literacyReading map projections and ocean-centered orientation, with particular attention to the Spilhaus projection.
- Working frameworksEngaging hydrofeminism, trans-corporeality, blue humanities, oceanic media, geological time, intersectional cyberfeminism, and Internet Bedroom culture.
- Source studyReading classical material concerning Libra, Aphrodite/Venus, Cancer/Karkinos, and related astrological traditions with care.
- Bedroom culture / personal webStudying early-2000s girlhood, bedroom culture, and personal web publishing as cultural production, self-making, collecting, linking, and worldbuilding.
- Living interfaceUsing Deep Time Lab as an artistic medium where research can appear in public and gather over time.
- Many ways of knowingHolding scientific, cartographic, vernacular, mythological, bodily, digital, and artistic knowledge in relation while preserving the particularity of each.
- Ritual theaterUsing performance and score-making to activate research through body, space, image, sound, and encounter.
- Work shaped by encounterMaking work that bears the duration, materials, observations, questions, and relations of Estuary.
PRACTICES / TRACES / REMAINS
Practice Archive
Field Notebook / Observatory
A record of encounters, conditions, drawings, questions, observations, and changing vocabulary. It can hold tide, weather, body, place, beings present, and the question produced by an encounter.
Material Structures Lab
A growing body of samples in netting, mesh, weave, twining, plaiting, paper pulp, slurry, deposition, joining, permeability, hybrid structures, and failure.
Internet Bedroom / Site Accumulation
The changing Deep Time Lab / Estuary website: pages, links, scans, graphics, fragments, diaries, source files, and structures produced while inhabiting the inquiry online.
FORMS OF EVIDENCE
- Field notebooks and observatory pages
- Watershed and ocean maps
- Sound recordings and listening notes
- Shoreline collections and species records
- Reading and media commonplace books
- Fiber studies and material structures
- Paper experiments and deposited forms
- Drawings, photographs, cyanotypes, and image archives
- Ritual scores, scripts, costumes, and performance documentation
- Internet Bedroom pages and site accumulations
- Focused research records
- Studio-body observations
- Finished works, installations, and field reports
COMPANIONS
Reading / Watching / Listening
Core Reading
- Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water
- Rachel Moss, The Internet Is Our Bedroom
- Kenneth W. Able, Beneath the Surface
- Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media
- Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness
- Rachel Moss, In the Girls' Room: Essays on Bedroom Culture from the 90s to Now
Supplemental Reading
- Thinking with Water
- Stacy Alaimo, Exposed
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned
- Rowan Jacobsen, The Living Shore
- Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea
- Robert Macfarlane, Underland
- Saturation: An Elemental Politics
- Estuarine Ecology, third edition
- Hesiod, Theogony
- Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite
- Hyginus, Astronomica
- Aratus, Phaenomena
Audio / Video
- Water Makes Us Wet
- River
- Aquarela
- Leviathan
- Crash: A Tale of Two Species
- Deep Look: horseshoe crab spawning
- PBS Terra: horseshoe crabs on the beach
- Spilhaus maps and ocean-centered visualizations
- Field recordings from the creek, river, bay, shore, bedroom, and studio