I am the Thames and the Thames is Me
This new commission explores the connections between human waste and the River Thames. It draws on civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s 19th Century designs for a new London sewer system alongside myths of fantastical creatures believed to populate the sewers. Chong Kwan’s research explored histories of river health in crisis; from the Great Stink of 1858, when untreated human waste overwhelmed the capital, to the cholera epidemics which claimed thousands of lives across the city and contemporary pollution.
Eight ‘river guardians’ are hand-crafted, incorporating materials drawn from the Thames and London sewage waste. Together they symbolise protection and stewardship, health inequalities in the capital and collective action. The title refers to a Māori saying associated with the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (New Zealand), which has been granted legal personhood. The work calls attention to the management of the waste that we ourselves create, and its impact on the health of the river that sustains us and the city in which we live.
Sites of pollution and waste management along the River Thames are shown in a calico wall hanging, made using natural dyes. A printed and collaged fantastical fabric map of the River Thames features sewers, mythical creatures and historical and contemporary testimonies of pollution, finished with hand-painted bio- waste.
Commissioned in collaboration with King’s College London Libraries & Collections
Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work is exhibited internationally in galleries and the public realm. Her large-scale photographic works, immersive installations, and sensory ritual events are at the intersection of historical and archival research and fine art practice and position the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social and ecological. She asks how interventions in museums, galleries, institutions, and the public realm can challenge their acquisitions, modes of public participation, the status of collections, and the ecologies in which they sit. She has made landscapes out of rotting food, created an imaginary island that spans the length of a shopping centre, transformed a concrete underpass into an immersive cave using 20,000 milk bottles, and even worked with neuroscientists and taxi drivers to explore how we navigate our memories.