Encountering water via the Penryn river
Tickets: https://ticketpass.org/event/ERDQWO/encountering-water
Transpire, respire, perspire, inspire.
Water permeates Penryn and shapes its becoming. Water flows in the medieval garden as power and for power. In provision, we forgot. Lulled into a false sense of insecurity, we unwittingly polluted that which was most precious, and forgot how to honour.
Join ecological designer, hydrodynamicist, sailor, and renewable energy systems specialist Dr Rebecca Sykes and writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven on an experimental watery walk through Penryn. Following water upstream, we will bring attention to water and explore our ways of knowing water, as well as the ways in which water knows us. Who is water? How can re-remembering water and its ways help us become bodies of water for future times?
Using pilgrimage, art, ceremony and science, Sophie and Rebecca will open up ways into water through mythology, posthumanism, hydrodynamics and engineering, exploring water through both its site-specific particularity and its mythological and ecological universality. We will culvert vision and duct attention, encountering water on our way upstream through Penryn to nurture knowledges as future bodies of water.
Expect explorative creative practice, experimental ritual, richly textured discussions and gestures towards new/ancient ways of knowing.
A (fluid) structure
9.45 – Meet at The Convivial + check in
10am – Walk 1: Watery worldviews, raising water & water in ceremony
12.30pm – Lunch
1.30pm – Walk 2: Bodies of water & profane(d) water
3pm – Break
3.40 – Walk 3: Returning to source – a mythic pilgrimage for contemporary times?
What to bring
Suitable clothes for walking, including walking boots, as well as wet weather gear if necessary
A packed lunch
Snacks
A water bottle
A thermos of a hot drink if you wish
A small sketch book / blank notepad
A pen or pencil
Tickets
Please refer to the following suggestions when booking your place:
No income - pay what you can
Low income - £30
Medium income - £50
High income - £70
Supporter ticket - £70+
Facilitators
Sophie Craven is a writer, artist and facilitator based in Cornwall, UK. She graduated from SOAS university in 2016 with a BA in Arabic and Social Anthropology, and a specialisation in memory, imagination and heritage sites (with fieldwork taking place in the West Bank of Palestine). She worked in learning and facilitation for seven years, including co-founding The Slow Work Garden, before completing her MA in Poetics of Imagination at Schumacher College / Dartington School of Arts in 2024. Sophie is coordinator and host of The Convivial, and her current research interests include sacred landscape, ritual, mythopoetics and psyche.
Dr Rebecca Sykes has studied and practiced in service to the climate since curtailing a degree in aeronautical engineering to move into renewable energy in 2004. She now practices in the space of design for transition, ecological design and regenerative design where possible. She has a PhD in hydrodynamics for wave energy conversion from University College Cork, an MSc in Renewable Energy Systems Technology and a BEng in Aeronautical Engineering, both from Loughborough University. Rebecca has worked in academic and commercial environments and explored new philosophies and technologies in the energy and engineering sectors for marine renewable energy systems. She created a public facing project, Clean Seas Odyssey, an expeditionary project learning about marine plastic pollution in 2018, having been inspired by systems thinking and her time working on traditional wooden sailing boats. In 2022, she completed an MA in Ecological Design Thinking where she explored healing and care through relationships with water around the Fal and Carrick Roads through swimming, sailing, walking and wallowing. Whilst following, encountering and being led by water, she explored feminist and hydrofeminist lenses. She is now a part-time commercial skipper of an Isles of Scilly pilot cutter, and works in renewable energy development, whilst developing her design research themes.
Tickets: https://ticketpass.org/event/ERDQWO/encountering-water