UJ Island, Vaal Dam
2024

A Pooling is an intervention created in a freestanding, fibreglass ‘tuckshop’ structure on UJ Island, a hillock farm that became an island in the 1930s when the Vaal Dam was filled. This intervention considers the lives and afterlives of accumulation, from within a repository for considerable quanitities of water and anthropogenic waste. It contains accumulations of three years of material research practice into the Vaal Dam, including bottles of water from all the dams that feed this Dam, remnants of previous paper-based work, drawings made on paper made with water from the Dam, and shards of tiles carried from the Witwatersrand watershed and collected by my child. 

I invited a group of Johannesburg-based participants to join me at the Island, to engage with the intervention and the artificial, polluted body of water from which we all live . We walked the shoreline in discussions, and collected water in buckets and jars which was carried back to the intervention and poured into a plastic sheet filled with Vaal Dam water. This performative act implicated the visitors in the art work, as well as in the water that is both our most necessary resource, and a repository for human and industrial waste.