Fluid Ground is a curatorial research project which diffracts artistic practices across situated waters, producing immersive encounters that amplify our planetary connectedness as bodies of water.
Kwartz Kapital Konstruction Kollider, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London (2014)
Image Description: The image depicts an art installation in a dark, brick-walled arched tunnel. The installation consists of large structures with a reflexive and metallic material and a dramatic light design.
Dr Kirsten Cooke’s curatorial research project, Fluid Ground received the Goldsmiths’ College PRDF award (2023) to produce alternative models for mapping our human relationship with the landscape, through a focus on hydrology, ecology, queer theory and forms of non-human embodiment and machine vision. Fluid Ground aims to address the global challenges of climate change on a subjective, local, and site-responsive scale, so that we feel connected to the planet rather than defeated by our contemporary context.
Fluid Ground explores our relationship to the planet through the medium of water. Recent artistic and curatorial practices’ that research water, have largely presented it either metaphorically, poetically, or transcendentally, but it has not been addressed to challenge our approaches to mapping and how they frame our relationships with the planet. Contemporary approaches to cartography are still largely anthropocentric, colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist; deploying methodologies in which humans are situated outside or above the terrain of the map. In contrast, Fluid Ground places humans in the map as planetary actors that are connected to wider contexts; we are bodies of water connected by the wider planetary flows that pass through us. It aims to decolonise and queer cartography by curating and commissioning public outputs that produce immersive watery maps through exhibitions, workshops, performances, and publications.
Snow Crash, IMT gallery, London (2019)
Image Description: The image shows an art installation featuring a scaffolding structure interwoven with white rope-like material and adorned with small pink sculptures. Several screens displaying video content are mounted on the scaffolding, and a laptop is placed on a makeshift platform.
One of the most recent outputs for the project is Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground (AHFG), which is a fluid curatorial map in publication form. AHFG will be launched at Matt’s Gallery, London with a set of readings, performances and film screenings. For AHFG, Kirsten commissioned nine artists to respond to Dorset waters through residencies at The Poorhouse Reading Rooms, or to respond to situated waters near them, or by producing new work that continues their watery research. Artists involved in the project are:
Charlie Franklin, Carl Gent, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Ezra Jackson, Melanie Jackson, Harun Morrison, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Maggie Roberts, Lucy Sames
Metabolic Markets: Dimensionally Diabolical Department, GIANT gallery, Bournemouth (2021)
Image Description: A group of large sculptures are presented in a gallery environment, including a large red, black and white structure in the foreground with a silver hand over a wooden support.
Blurb on the back of the AHFG publication that is published by Matt’s Gallery and The Poorhouse Reading Rooms:
‘We are bodies of water and bodies in air, steam and rain. We are hydro-flows, bodies whirling with ancient oceanic eddies and techno-waters. We are ecotones, or transitory zones, where body meets land meets water meets eye meets hand meets machine.
Aqueous Humours are bodily fluids affecting our temperaments, encouraging laughter at the anthropocentric knowledge systems that ripple through the hydrological cycle. Fluid Ground is a watery mapping, which denatures cartography through practices of immersion, aquatics, time travel and the posthuman lenses of geological, animal and machine vision. This publication encompasses experimental nonfiction, fiction, diagram, scent and image.
Published By Matt’s Gallery and the Poorhouse Reading Rooms
Funded by University of Plymouth, Goldsmiths College, University of London.’
Welcome to the Ratcatcher’s Song and Dance Plague Band of Good Dogs, Steam Works gallery, London (2023) – solo exhibition by Dale Holmes
Image Description: The image shows an art exhibition. Two men are engaged in conversation in the center, standing amidst several large abstract paintings that hang in the space. Cardboard cutouts of stylized figures, including a cat-like creature playing a cymbal, are also present on the floor. Other people are visible in the background, further suggesting the context of an art opening or similar event.
Kirsten Cooke’s research explores the way in which curating mediates and stages how we ‘know’, looking at exhibition environments to explore the space of infrastructure and queer ecologies. Her practice situates curating alongside and in tension with artists through conversations that are rendered tangible in physical exhibition architectures.
Past exhibitions include Metabolic Markets (2021) and Snow Crash (2019). Metabolic Markets: A Dimensionally Diabolic Department,GIANT gallery (Bournemouth), activated the space of what was previously a Debenham’s department store to provide a destandardised encounter with art; reanimating the debris, such as mannequins, electrical shelving, and clothes racks, as modes of display. Snow Crash, IMT gallery (London),was built out of scaffolding materials to provide an infrastructure that could support as opposed to contain difference.
Cooke’s current research project Fluid Ground interrogates and aims to provide alternatives to the logics and systems that manipulate our relationship to the planet, with a focus on producing immersive and fluid maps. Research outputs include, the chapter ‘Damp Bodies Fluid Ground’, in GOT DAMP, published by TACO, London (2023), and the article ‘A Slice of Fluid Ground’, in the Journal of Writing as Creative Practice published by Intellect Books, and a paper ‘Aqueous Humours: Fluid Ground’ at the London Conference for Critical Thought at Greenwich University, London (2024). Aqueous Humours: Fluid Ground (AHFG) is an exhibition as publication, which will act as a curatorial map in book form that hosts queer and decolonial artistic interpretations of Dorset waters. It is built in partnership with The Poor House Reading Rooms, Dorset, who hosted residencies and are co-publishing AHFG with Matt’s Gallery, London.
Previously to this, Cooke designed three international curatorial research projects: Material Conjectures, Concrete Plastic and House of Hysteria. Recent outputs include, ‘Transfictioning’ a chapter in Archives on Show, edited by Beatrice von Bismarck and published by Archive Books, Berlin (2022). Cooke is currently the curator of the newly launched Steam Works gallery, London (2023 – ongoing) and was previously the curator at IMT gallery (2020 – 2022). She is a lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths (UoL). Previously to this she lectured at Birkbeck (UoL), Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) and the University of Reading.
Artwork from written and visual essay commission for the publication Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground: image ‘Rock Camo’ by Maggie Roberts/0rphan Drift (2024)
Image Description: a computer manipulated image shows octopus skin patterns proliferate over rocks in a pebble beach landscape.
Previous published outputs in the project:
Performative Paper at a Conference: ‘Aqueous Humours: Fluid Ground’ at the London Conference in Critical Thought: Watery Speculations stream, University of Greenwich, 28-19 June (2024)
Chapter: ‘Damp Bodies: Fluid Ground’ (2023) GOT DAMP: Avril Corroon, published by TACO!, London pp. 102-113. ISBN 9781838279271
Article: ‘A Slice of Fluid Ground’ (2023) Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 16(2), pp. 199-213. ISSN: 1753-5190
