Hayley Suviste’s River Irwell

From The River’s Mouth

In 2024, The Guardian published an article titled ‘Would you swim in that?’ written by Alex Clark. The piece highlighted the severe pollution of the River Irwell, noting that in 2023, the river experienced the highest rate of sewage spills in England, with 95 spills per mile, totaling 11,974 spills. Residents and visitors expressed concerns over the contamination, emphasising the need for greater public involvement in sewage discharge decisions and increased investment in infrastructure.

In contrast, Arthur Ransome's 1926 article portrayed the River Irwell as a ‘magnificent’ waterway, lamenting its transformation into a ‘sewer’ due to industrial pollution. He expressed hope that future generations might witness the return of trout and salmon to Manchester's waters, emphasising the need for factories to manage their waste responsibly.

These articles, separated by nearly a century, underscore the persistent environmental challenges faced by the River Irwell. While Ransome's piece reflects a vision of hope and potential restoration, Clark's 2024 article highlights ongoing concerns and the urgent need for action to address the river's pollution.

As an artist and lover of natural waterways, it was music to my ears that in 2025, Manchester-based sound artist Hayley Suviste would reimagine the River Irwell through a residency at UoS Acoustic Laboratories, resulting in three stages of sound and image installation titled ‘From The River’s Mouth’.

A gift from Hayley to the City of Salford, to SFTOC festival, to river lovers everywhere.

I wanted to communicate my experience of ‘From The River’s Mouth’ to Hayley and have chosen a medium I adore to do so - thinking through the written form as a method to understand a visceral embodied experience of rivers, and of this artwork.

I. in the shallows (anechoic chamber)

There is a room whose movement I feel beneath my feet. Bouncing floors separate cushions of sound - I feel like I am inside water. This is an anechoic chamber, a space designed to absorb all sound reflections, where silence becomes a presence in itself. In the River Irwell, it becomes a kind of listening vessel, isolating the layered textures captured underwater - currents, debris, the distant hum of city life - from any outside interference.

This first room allows for eight bodies, meaning my group is separated into two. I am in the second group and before going in we have some time with Hayley while the first group experience something I later learn is all encompassing.

Hayley explains she has filled all of the speakers with underwater sounds from her time with the river over the last three months. That in the second room, winter frost will be present with images of sunlight, all of which I forget once I am in each act of the river.

Someone asks Hayley about the hydrophone devices used to record the water and I later research this so I am firm within my own knowledge. I am in love with hydrophones, underwater microphones that are used to capture otherwise inaudible worlds beneath the surface of a body of water.

Underwater objects (such as boats, the feet of ducks, or even the walls of culverted rivers) produce sound waves that travel through the water, creating subtle pressure changes as they move. Hydrophones, often made with piezoelectric materials, translate these changes into electrical signals. When a sound wave encounters the hydrophone, the pressure causes the material to vibrate, generating a voltage that mirrors the frequency and intensity of the sound. These signals are then amplified and recorded using audio equipment, revealing a rich tapestry of textures. Both active and passive hydrophones are used in fields like marine and oceanographic research, underwater communication, and monitoring noise pollution. For Hayley, they offer a different yet resonant purpose: a sonic portrait of the Irwell, connecting scientific method with artistic imagination.

Hayley is full of imagination. She tells us we can pretend to be underwater creatures if we like and I prepare to metamorphose into a star fish, with a layer of city smog.

Layered is a good word to describe this first room. My chest is vibrating and I am encouraging myself to breathe into the space. In the shallows I become unaware of the dryness of the room. My sentient body takes over and I refrain from lying down on the netting that separates me from the speakers and foam material below, I close my eyes and imagine myself floating with underwater sounds - natural rhythms of water rippling alongside creatures - tadpoles, the feet of swans paddling, my fellow star fishes and currents of time. The hydrophone recordings are suspended in pure clarity, as if the river has been lifted from its banks and poured into the air around me.

I am speechless as I leave and am led towards the listening room. Please no one touch me or ask me what I think in this moment. I am not ready to be human again. Later I reflect on the room itself, reminiscent of those foam pools I used to spring into during gymnastics as a youth.

II. at the river’s edge (listening room)

There is a dark room with seats lined at the back and beanbags on the floor. I lingered in the first room too long to find a seat so sit cross legged on the floor. Two screens play beautifully composed moving river images - two swans swimming together, reflections of their bodies pull them into frame moving from the right image through a portal (a gap between screens) into the left. The images and sounds feel intimate - we have been invited to sit and listen and watch the river through Hayley’s gaze and ears. Ethereal sounds pull me from natural waters, the breeze and a woman’s voice calling ‘Reggie’ so many times you realise it’s a dog. I laugh raptured in light, I cannot believe this is the river Irwell until a shopping trolley appears. I feel relief, not that there is rubbish in the river, but that a river’s reality is being played out for an audience to see. This work is special, it is beautifully gentle yet electrifying.

III. outflow (reverberation room)

It is in the reverberation room that the spell fully takes hold. The sounds, of the River Irwell murmuring below the surface, of a clarinet weaving through its currents, fill the space like breath. Reverberation is the lingering of sound after its source has stopped, a resonance that bounces and blends as it meets walls, water, and air. Here, echoes become tactile. Each note or ripple of river sound sends vibrations across the shallow pool at my feet, causing the water to tremble in response, tiny waves pulsing outward in time with the sounds. A star-shaped pattern of light dances on the floor, reflected from a glass bowl of water lit from behind, as though the night sky has been pulled down and scattered across the room. I sit at the front, where my legs rest in the water, feeling each sound, as though the space itself is breathing. It is here I realise that Hayley is not just an artist but a magician of sound, wonder, and subtle humour. I know this is the final room, but I don’t want it to end.

Hayley has transformed all three rooms into worlds entirely her own, each one a carefully tuned space where sound, light, and water blur the lines between the real and the imagined. I find myself telling her how amazing she is. I use the words special and awe inspiring and we giggle. Her talent is unmistakable, but it’s her playful and precise spirit that’s infectious. We go to the toilet together, and she laughs, calling it the fourth room. We imagine recording our own water sounds there, pretending to inform an imaginary stranger of our watery delights.

A River Framework

A river is a watershed. We don’t know where a river begins because it comes from so many different places…just like an idea.

Last year I heard news that Robert Macfarlane was writing a new book about rivers titled ‘is a river alive?’ This news came a few months after I had asked that same question in a workshop held at Paradise Works when thinking of the River Irwell who had recently been named the no.1 most polluted river in England and Wales.

A year later I am sat between two strangers at the Royal Geographical Society whose academic conference I have just been accepted into and who have recently given me a grant towards my fieldwork. The grant is slight but ‘important on my CV’ (it is mostly going to the people who will help me to transcribe interviews/edit material), the conference means I am welcome into the geography discipline - sounds, images, text, blurry interdisciplinary included.

I don’t know at which stage I began to believe in myself this much, but I do know the roots of this research and why it is important that I do it.

Recently on a tired-overthinking lull I looked to its origins for support - a research proposal from 2019 about processes of social housing in Manchester told through documentary film and community engagement, and an arts proposal from 2020 about working with communities along the River Shannon - exploring my own heritage and collecting stories, sounds and images from different communities along its banks. Both went through processes of rejection and enlightenment, both merged into one proposal and became the work that I am now carrying out full time.

Work that feels like a river - its source being mine and my families experiences of social housing processes in Manchester at the hands of gentrification, along with a lifelong love of rivers and the earth, of sound, image, poetry, and history that often falls between the margins; usually told in retrospect through someone else’s words.

On arriving at the RGS last night I refrained from telling myself this place is too fancy for me. Instead I say that I belong here as much as the next. By the end of the night I have exchanged details with the stranger to my right and the stranger to my left holds my hands, looks into my eyes and wishes me luck. I somehow have both names etched in my mind. There is much to say about the talk and about these interactions. I later wish to myself that each of my encounters with strangers and non-strangers are as gentle and nurturing. That only softness, openness and support exists in my life and in all of my interactions, in all my collaborations.

‘Hope is a discipline’ says RM last night. I am deciding to crystallise my wishes into hope.

I am also deciding that I am presently in the body of the river, working with brilliant people and water whose life lives on through our creative encounters. The different elements of this work feels like tributaries and I am wondering if at some point it will feed a new river, move through an estuary and join forces with an ocean.

Writing Rivers

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.