Apology from the River is my interdisciplinary artistic research practice, rooted in walking and painting, and grounded in the source of the River Thames as well as geographical archives. In literary works, the Thames has often been portrayed as undergoing a threefold transformation—from a river of glory, to a river of death, and finally into a tranquil, domesticated river folded into the national historical narrative. Against this backdrop, I try to move away from an anthropocentric perspective and re-examine the river’s identity from a non-human standpoint. Through the embodied experience of walking, I begin to weave a subjective archive of the “present”.
Walking Record, March 2025: In March 2025, we set off from Cirencester’s Central Park, holding a map in hand, walking toward Thames Head. The A433 Tetbury Road is the direct route, but to avoid traffic and exhaust fumes, we entered the woods beside the road and followed signs for visitors from the Royal Agricultural University into the fields. After walking for over three hours, we arrived at the monument marked on the map as ‘Thames Head Stone’ —the source of the River Thames. The Thames Head appeared somewhat simple: a dried-up ‘well’ formed by a pile of stones, and nothing more. In confusion, we followed the dried-up ancient riverbed, trying to find the first trickle of living water. The scent of grass, the warmth of steaming soil, and the hum of bumblebees in wild flowers filled the air. Stepping across stones embedded in the riverbed, we reached a bridge that seemed abandoned. Behind it was a shallow pool, soaking a patch of white pebbles. Tree branches beside the pool had already covered the far end of the bridge, forming a hollow space in midair—mysterious, like a suspended tree cave. Looking ahead along the pool, the water began to flow slowly. We kept walking. The aquatic plants in the river swayed, the sounds around us became richer, the wind turned delicate, and fallen petals spun gently into the stream…We found it! The source of the River Thames.
For me, the history of the Thames’ source region embodies a quintessential imperial narrative: from a literary symbol of glory to a channel for resource transportation during the Industrial Revolution, the river has long been depicted and used as the backdrop to human history. Yet I notice how such narratives often overlook the river’s own materiality and vital qualities. I keep asking myself: does nature possess intrinsic value, independent of its utility to humans? This question echoes the proposition of American ecophilosopher Paul W. Taylor, who introduced the concept of biocentric egalitarianism, later forming the foundation of the deep ecology movement. Through my research, I suggest that rivers, too, have experienced a kind of colonialism upon their subjectivity—assigned with false, fixed identities that disregard their capacity for flux, transformation, and even disappearance.
In response, I turned to counter-mapping as a method to challenge, through practice, the systems of power and territorial order reinforced by traditional maps. Nancy Peluso has described counter-mapping as a tool of empowerment, capable of revealing hidden land relations and ecological justice issues. In this project, I created a multi-layered painting using soil, stones, dried plants, and traces of water gathered during my walks, suspending it among local trees. The installation became not only a visual record of ecological trauma but also a way of giving agency to natural materials, unsettling the binary between the human and the non-human.
From the perspective of ecological ethics, I see this work as a response to Timothy Morton’s idea of ecological coexistence, emphasizing that the relationship between humans and rivers is not only ethical but also ontological. For me, the river’s narrative is not simply ecological, but the outcome of entanglements between culture, history, and environment. My counter-mapping practice is therefore both an attempt to restore the river’s subjectivity and a redefinition of historical memory. After the walk, I drew a counter-map directly onto a field of grass, shaping a spiritual map based on the journey.
“This journey became a spiritual map, revealing the contrast between purity and pollution. I staged a satirical hunt for the so-called ‘savage’ stones to critique how humans have scapegoated nature and signed ‘unequal treaties’ with it. Through counter-mapping, this river became a silent witness to empire, violence, and erased histories.”
Through this project, I invite myself and others to reconsider the complexities of a postcolonial ecological context: migration is not only a human phenomenon but also unfolds in the natural environment; flow refers not just to spatial movement but also to the shifting of identities and narrative power; and resilience appears not only in ecological restoration but also in the persistence of cultural memory against erasure. With this work, I aim to offer another way of reading and narrating the geographically marked space of the Thames’ source through an interdisciplinary practice that bridges history, art, and geography. In doing so, I hope to challenge dominant discourses of history and environmental ethics, proposing instead a critical ecological perspective grounded in perceptual experience.
Evelyn Xinyi Hu(b. 2002) is an artist who works between China, the UK, and South Korea. She holds an MFA from the Royal College of Art. Walking is at the heart of her practice — a way of thinking, sensing, and creating. Through painting, installation, moving image, and site-specific projects, she explores places where history and memory linger, from war remnants to landscapes of natural and cultural heritage. Her works trace the hidden layers beneath what might seem like ordinary or peaceful scenes, inviting new ways of seeing and remembering. Currently, her practice focuses on the Thames River and the lingering energies and perceptual traces of past wars embedded in present-day landscapes. Through techniques such as counter-mapping, she seeks to deconstruct anthropocentric historical narratives and transform personal reflections into responses to broader systemic conditions.
Email: xhu60010@gmail.com
Website: https://evelynxinyihu.cargo.site/
Instagram: @evelynhu0717
Bibliography
Ackroyd, P., 2008. Thames: sacred river. Random House.
Cosgrove, D.E., 1998. Social formation and symbolic landscape. Univ of Wisconsin Press.
Harley, J.B., 1989. Deconstructing the map. Cartographica: The international journal for geographic information and geovisualization, 26(2), pp.1-20.
Linton, J., 2010. What is water?: The history of a modern abstraction. UBC press.
Morton, T., 2009. Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press.
Naess, A., 2017. The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary. In The ethics of the environment (pp. 115-120). Routledge.
Peluso, N.L., 1995. Whose woods are these? Counter‐mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), pp.383-406.
Taylor, P.W., 2011. Respect for nature: A theory of environmental ethics. Princeton University Press.