3-screen film 10 min dur.
In this film, still image sequences, audio, infra-red aerial photography (LiDAR), archival and recent film and images, navigational maps (from 1581 onwards) and film are combined in a bid to capture the mutable nature of this estuary, where ever-changing conditions and each succeeding wave of human habitation have left their trace.
Confluence reflects the water and moon realm of tidal ebb and flow, and the resulting estuarine balance or confluence; the river flow in counterbalancing the incoming tides. This near-miraculous balance enables the lifeblood of shipping to occur, and maintains a complex environment, one that is at once wild, cultivated and industrial. The work reflects the amazing and incongruous results of this confluence – large ships sailing along the Trent towards Goole, and phenomena such as the high tide bore waves (the Trent Aegir) that traverse from the sea along the Humber and along the Trent, sometimes as far as Gainsborough. The film also explores how water, once no longer in check, floods and transforms, turning fields into lakes and transforming once inhabited houses from ordinary, to the ‘uncanny’ or ‘Un-Heimlich’. The LiDAR images reveal the systems of underground water networks which spread like roots or arteries under this land, and the contrast between ‘above and ‘below’ this shifting universe.
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