Following Streams is an ongoing experimental moving image and installation project exploring waterways as routes through landscape, memory, chance encounters and association. Combining filmmaking, physical journeys, sound and sculptural installation, the project follows streams and rivers through changing urban, industrial and natural environments, allowing the landscape and the people encountered within it to influence the direction of each work.

The first episode, Following Streams: Coppermill Stream (2026), began through a chance encounter with Tony at a café beside the River Lea. Tony noticed a shopping trolley I had adapted to transport my canoe and began talking to me about his own inflatable canoe, which a local rowing club allows him to store there. He uses the canoe to travel along the waterways collecting rubbish from the river.

During our conversation, Tony told me about a small jetty he had constructed from discarded materials he had collected from the surrounding waterways. The jetty was hidden along Coppermill Stream, a narrow and secluded waterway that he explained was only accessible by canoe. He would travel there and sit beside the water completing crosswords.

The encounter became the starting point for the film. The idea of a handmade jetty, constructed from discarded materials and concealed somewhere along an inaccessible stream, created a curious, quirky and mysterious destination. I had never seen the jetty and knew it only through Tony’s description. Coppermill Stream therefore became somewhere that had to be explored and the jetty something that had to be found.The journey begins within the industrial landscape of Bow and follows the waterways of the Lea Valley towards Coppermill Stream. 

As the journey progresses, the familiar urban landscape gradually gives way to a dense and increasingly overgrown environment. Influenced by the journey into the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the work explores how an ordinary geographical location can become strange, psychologically charged and almost fantastical through the process of searching for something that remains unseen.

The attempt to reach Tony’s jetty became central to the work. As I travelled further along Coppermill Stream, dense watercress and vegetation eventually made it impossible to continue by canoe. I left the canoe and attempted to continue through the stream on foot, eventually wading through chest deep water before being forced to abandon the journey. A drone was subsequently sent further along the stream to search for the site from above. Through this aerial view the jetty was finally located, with Tony’s chair still sitting beside the water.

Tony’s habit of completing crosswords at the jetty also became fundamental to the structure of the work. Rather than simply appearing as a visual motif, the crossword almost directs the narrative itself. Individual words within the crossword become prompts for scenes, images, memories and associations, influencing where the film moves next. The words are interpreted through associative montage, allowing unexpected relationships to emerge between apparently unrelated images, experiences and ideas.

In this way, some control over the narrative is surrendered to the crossword. It provides a structure without prescribing a single meaning. A word can generate multiple visual and psychological associations, while the relationship between one image and another creates further possibilities. The crossword therefore becomes both a narrative device and a method of editing, drawing upon ideas of associative montage and the way meaning can be constructed through juxtaposition.

The crossword also moves beyond the screen to become a sculptural element within the installation. The physical grid extends the structure of the film into the exhibition space, allowing the journey, the landscape and the process of association to exist across moving image and object.