Voices of the River: Weaving Connections with the Ouse

This workshop formed the first of a two-part programme on artistic practices and the growing Rights of Nature movement. Insights from the workshop were shared at ‘Voices of Water‘, the second part of this programme, held at Tate Modern on 6 September 2025, bringing together perspectives across artists’ practice, community organising, law and science. The programme builds on HTRC:T’s ‘Waterways symposium‘, which explored how water binds us across histories and futures, and evolves out of TBA21’s ongoing involvement with the Rights of Nature movement and the Confluence of European Water Bodies network, of which the River Ouse is also part.

‘Voices of the River‘ followed the successful local release of the Charter of Rights for the River Ouse in Sussex, the first time that a council has formally supported a river charter of this kind in the UK. The day’s programme was co-led by Love Our Ouse (LOO), the community initiative group behind the Ouse’s charter and the ongoing campaign for its recognition. In the opening remarks by Matthew Bird of LOO, the day’s activities were positioned as part of the group’s ongoing work to involve people more closely with the river, with outreach cast as a chain of consistent attentions rather than a single event.

Activities began outside by the edge of the Ouse. Fifteen participants gathered alongside invited artists and local experts to explore how we, the human public, might understand and advocate for the river’s intrinsic rights to live, thrive and evolve. Between us we shared the task of reading the Ouse Charter aloud, the river’s rhythmic swishing punctuated by a sequence of successive human voices asserting that the Ouse had the following:

This reading was followed by a brief, ceremonial pouring of river water from vessel to bowl by Natasha Padbury of LOO.

The day took place as the rights-of-nature framework is rapidly entering mainstream public awareness in the UK. In the group’s opening remarks, Bird recounted how, in 2023, when the motion to recognise the Ouse went to Lewes Council, only four rivers were progressing any kind of rights work; by the day of the workshop, they numbered at least twenty.

I had been invited to ‘Voices of the River‘ by co-curator Marleen Boschen after reviewing an exhibition about rights for the River Don in Sheffield in spring 2025. The arguments in that piece, about where language ends and responsibility begins, had brought me here. In May 2025, just a month before the workshop, popular nature writer Robert Macfarlane published Is a River Alive?, an impassioned rights-of-rivers polemic that launched the idea of legal personhood for rivers into the realm of widespread public conversation. The idea of protected rights for natural entities has never been more widely discussed or accessible, which has given the rights-of-nature framework exceptional nationwide momentum comparable to that of the ‘rewilding’ movement in the early 2010s, when it became a household term thanks to work by advocacy groups and popular books by George Monbiot. Yet the practice of rights for nature remains nascent with local river charters currently entirely extra-legal and prosecution on their basis unprecedented in the UK.

The first artist’s workshop, led by Emma Critchley, began further along the bank with listening exercises to help us ‘hear’ the river’s voice, which at this point meant the literal sounds it made. Critchley encouraged us to meet the Ouse ‘as a context rather than a subject’; to notice our relation to it instead of extracting its content. The tasks were simple: to slow down, breathe mindfully, notice and ask ourselves questions. In the shift to stillness and calm brought by deeper breathing, ‘voice’ stopped being a metaphor and became a felt, bodily practice of noticing the rhythm, timing, texture and resistance of our surroundings. The aim was not to wrestle a quotable sentence from the river, but to practise a form of outward-facing attention that could survive subsequent discussions, in which our own opinions, desires and selves would inevitably creep back into the foreground. Further downriver and inland, a subsequent movement practice involving our whole bodies in a demarcated area of field allowed us to imagine movement as an earthbound fluid entity.

In the afternoon artists Ruthie Martin and Lisa Dear led concurrent making sessions. Martin, currently artist-in-residence at the Railway Land surrounding the Pavilion, conducted a workshop centred around materials made from the Ouse itself, using a selection of inks and paints the artist had created from clay, nettles, water, berries and herbs gathered along the river’s banks. Following a group listening session focused on sounds from different depths of the river, we worked collectively on a painting, using mark-making as an extension of our listening, letting the arm carry the line rather than forcing an outcome. Meanwhile, with Lisa Dear, participants learned to weave supple willow branches into the shape of a mullet – not the haircut, but rather a locally abundant fish. For Dear, an artist living in Sussex, the practice of basketmaking ‘arises from a life spent living in the wilds of Britain travelling with horses and wagons’. Both activities pushed us away from idealising the Ouse in purely cerebral terms and further towards an embodied understanding. As anyone who’s done agricultural or landscaping labour knows, the surest way to punctuate an abstract romance with nature is by getting your hands entangled in it.

The afternoon concluded with a discussion in which all participants, convenors, artists and experts were invited to share ideas and insights from the day. A sticky preoccupation for many of us was the Charter’s commitment to an ‘independent and active voice’ for the river. As the river does not possess human language, how do we avoid projecting our interests onto it? Advocating for waterways involves, by necessity, translating their needs into human-centred frameworks such as the national legal system. In doing so we risk, in Macfarlane’s words, ending up with only ‘human proxies… ventriloquising “river” and “forest” in a kind of cosplay animism’.1 Water authorities and local companies, for example, can be supportive of rights-for-nature; yet the talk of rights can be embraced for optics while business-as-usual persists downstream.

The same language that encourages everyone to feel connected to and responsible for their local river can easily be recast to shift the onus for its health away from systemic polluters and onto conscientious individuals. Even the rights to flow and to native biodiversity are complex, as every river in the UK’s intensely managed landscape is subject to competing human and non-human priorities epitomised through weirs, sluices, culverts, floods and tidal pulls. Flow here is choreographed; someone always decides. Biodiversity, too, requires more than admiration – corridors, thresholds, and the careful business of deciding what ‘native’ means and what it excludes are questions inextricably entwined with centuries of human culture and legislation.

A few notes from the edges of the day: we talked about the shifting baselines of climate change, and the way previous conceptions of ‘normal’ keep walking away from us. In group discussion, Iris Murdoch’s idea of ‘unselfing’ – a deliberate turning outward until the self loosens, and other beings come into view – was offered as a means to avoid personal projection onto the river.2 Someone mentioned language’s possible origin in echoes of the more-than-human world, recasting speech as subject to and produced by place, rather than dominating it. A local history expert drew a line between the river’s present charter and a local Anglo-Saxon charter often cited as the first reference to the Ouse, noting the fragility of both documents: the physical delicacy of the historic charter due to age, and the conceptual vulnerability of the Ouse charter due to its newness.

Crucially, ‘Voices of the River‘ kept its focus on the Ouse while situating it in national and international contexts. Successful rights-of-rivers movements elsewhere – in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Ecuador, Canada – were drawn on to show how personhood can formalise long-standing kinship. In the UK, by contrast, even ardent river lovers often meet waterways as resources, leisure or work spaces. The Ouse Charter served as a constant reference point for overturning our broader relationship to nature: a local, civic form for commitments that can otherwise dissipate in sentiment.

It was incredibly fruitful to delve into the complexities of what implementing these protective mechanisms could mean, and the wide variety of interpretations different people had of them, leaving participants with many new questions and avenues for enquiry. The startling scale of the cultural shift required to move from stewardship to kinship in the UK was highlighted by the diversity of perspectives present in even the small, aligned-interest group present on this day.

‘Voices of the River‘ also made room for ceremony without mistaking ritual for remedy. It translated the language of rights into practices of making and attunement that participants could carry out of the room. It surfaced the politics surrounding the Ouse’s charter without surrendering to them. Most usefully, it showed how the Ouse already speaks: through the presence or absence of indicator species and contaminants, through the levels of its water and the health of its reedbeds, and in community memory and archive. Our task is to become more fluent in its language, and more accountable to what we hear. If there was a lingering caution, it is the familiar one: love of the river and symbolic recognitions can comfort us into thinking the work to protect the river is already done. It isn’t.