It is my pleasure to have an article published in Volume 4, Issue 1 of ‘A Row of Trees’. I had a wonderful time developing work as part of Sound Diaries Open Call - encouraged endlessly by the brilliant curatorial team at The Sonic Art Research Unit within Oxford Brookes University.
Introduction to research/er
Hello!
My name is Fiona Sinéad Brehony, and I am an artist and writer, working within spaces between Geography, documentary film, sound art and performance. I am currently working on a project that investigates possibilities of rivers as Cultural Heritage, with a specific focus on the socio-material history of River Irk in Manchester.
My research project is using participatory documentary filmmaking practices and Socially Engaged Art as a way to examine a relationship between Regeneration, Environmental River History, and Industrial Heritage in Manchester in the years between 1500 and 2026 – the point at which this study ends. It seeks to draw together these three elements, to establish a tripartite relationship in relation to ways people have experienced this area of Manchester, past and present. The time frame chosen for this study is significant in itself, as it spans pre-industrialisation, industrialisation, and post-industrialisation. The River Irk is a manufacturing hub of industrial Britain and the study takes place in an area beside the river that is currently undergoing a colossal transformation.
This research will contribute new knowledge to Environmental River History scholarship.
For this section of the research, I am drawing on Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection, 1529-2015, by environmental historian Leona Skelton (2017). Skelton ‘offers a template for a future body of work that dislodges the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history’, and I would like to join her – establishing the River Irk as another ‘river of choice’. I will be using Skelton’s research along with other river history literature (Peter Coates, Stefania Barca, and Richard White) as a guide to develop a practical framework for how I am approaching this research and adds the River Irk as an option of British environmental history. My aim is to add to environmental history works that ‘rightly obfuscate and complicate the artificial boundary that many people draw between the human and the natural’, demonstrating the historical magnitude of the shifting styles of these connections over time. I will be contributing new knowledge to this field using documentary filmmaking practices and creative engagement with river heritage. My aim is to use these methods to investigate the interaction between human and River, thus developing a socio-material history of the River Irk.
Environmental River Historians have studied the tangible material flows of rivers using intangible evidence such as oral histories and archive records as a way to (re)construct the past, make sense of the present and to (re)imagine possibilities for future rivers. My work aims to expand these studies by looking at material flows of the River Irk that no longer exist, establishing documentary filmmaking as a method in this field.
Documenting advertised Riverside apartments in the centre of Manchester, overlooking a river that is visibly in need of protection, is a vital part of this research. For this, I am intervening in scholarship relating to regeneration beside rivers and industrial heritage, questioning: to what extent does a river and its surroundings make a new building appealing, regardless of current sanitation levels?
My hope is that by engaging a wide community of residents, employees, and members of the public in the history and heritage of the River Irk, new insight of socio-material histories of the river will be revealed.
Why this area of research?
(In a nutshell) : I grew up in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where members of my family still reside. It was and is a Council Estate where many people thrive, some struggle, and others find pockets of imagination to hide inside before reaching an age of independence. I was not a happy young person, like a lot of people both from and not from a Council Estate. However, I found solace and freedom in creativity at my Grandmother’s house. This same Grandmother, who, at the age of 82 was handed a note from Manchester City Council informing her (side of the street) that they were bulldozing the prefabricated ‘social’ houses she and her family had lived in for almost 60 years (having moved into the new housing from Collyhurst in North Manchester, beside the river irk). By chance, my Grandmother moved over the road and watched as her home was demolished. A tremendous and exuberant writer (right up until her departure in 2016), she wrote a poetry collection entitled ‘The Flowering’ about finding light during immovable circumstances. This was and still is, to me, is a true act of resistance. Of working with creativity and natural environments to overcome an experience entrenched with sacrifice and loss. This experience was in 2010, and in 2019, I made a short film using an edited version of the poetry pamphlet to explore human experiences of regenerative urban processes. Following this, was a film about St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, and a desire to work with ‘hidden’ histories of a rapidly evolving city, whilst also finding my place within it. Around this same time, I developed a four-week course on the topic of light where participants from any subject collaborated using creative methods to explore their own relationship to light. For two years after then, I worked on intangible heritage projects as a filmmaker and writer, that eventually resulted in the development of a project about tracing intangible heritage of the River Irk and its human and more than human inhabitants. As an adult, I am much more at peace and incredibly passionate about using collaborative and artistic methods to look at ways we can interact with the agency of natural and urban environments, as to liberate the past and present history of the spaces we inhabit.
A practice in paying attention.
Autumn is here again and I am using nature, again. As soothing balms for skin eyes and mind. I watch leaves clapping together move my body in rhythm. Discotheques everywhere. River rages behind with birds above producing a natural surround sound experience. Unwashed I am happy counting ripples in the water there must be millions in this river, the Goyt. I sometimes notice an arrogance in seeming-knowing. When something is to be enjoyed and something else documented for pleasure of sending to a sister in a far away land or using it to convey experiences of being with water and other natural friends at a later date. Nature has become my work lately and occasionally I worry it’s no longer home. When this happens I say no on weekdays, never not recognising my privilege, to spent minutes sometimes hours with it. Allowing it to run over me while I watch and listen. Sometimes wondering if I am paying enough attention before falling asleep beside trees or dipping my feet into soggy earth we’ve named dirt. I am finding the more I record on devices, the more I am imagining an experience of sitting on a bench listening to my environment being presented through speakers. There is a lesson here (somewhere) in longevity and trust. To record some things, to write about them, and to set a date months from now playing them back if I choose. The immediacy of everything needs to be addressed. The immediacy of everything but peace, that is.