Confluences of art and research

Authors:

Abstract: The exhibition ‘Confluences: Water and People’ drew together creative, participatory, community-focused research by partners in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Malaysia, and the UK, as well as artists whose work connects with the River Tyne, its tributaries, people, and landscapes. This paper addresses this exhibition as a piece of research in its own right, aiming to answer two core research questions: (1) How do people connect with water? and (2) How can we develop new insights into the intangible values of water through exploring these relationships at both local (the specific) and global (the universal) scales? We explore the challenges of interdisciplinary work in relation to our curatorial-research process. The paper does not present or discuss the exhibition itself (we encourage readers to explore the online exhibition at: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/events/water-and-people/), but rather the curatorial process that underpinned it, and what it meant as a piece of research. In doing so, we offer learnings for the development of curation-as-method within interdisciplinary research projects, particularly those with a physical sciences focus such as water security.