There were so many shoots for this project, some of them made alone along the cold banks of the Yarra and others made in the summer heat—boating, swimming and hiking with friends.

From these experiences I developed a rather interesting and complex relationship with the river, a relationship that is somewhat hard to articulate. It was as if the project had been a series of conversations with the Yarra itself and that—while we often digressed—we usually always came back to the same common subjects: fluidity, movement, transition, feeling and time.

I became interested in the length of the river—about how this distance was composed of, or subject to, a series of flows or speeds—about how this distance, and the river itself, could considered a unit of time. One hour. One day. One Yarra.

I became interested in the buoyancy of its clay-coloured waters—about the weight of the particles it carried suspended inside it and about the weight of the boats, the bodies and the reflected light that floated on its surface.

I wandered—sometimes with direction and other times aimlessly—amidst its forking tributaries. I crept, floated and slid along its shifting form. Sometimes the Yarra is so serpentine in nature that it feels like it will almost double back upon itself. In other places it feels domesticated: carved and straightened by man’s heavy tools.

The variety of this all struck me, but what struck me more was that this variety was set against an overwhelming consistency. Despite its surface being mirror smooth one moment and rapid the next, the Yarra spoke the same language across its length. Despite its banks shouldering an urban city here and a forest there, the river retains a stable identity. Certainly it is not the same throughout, but motifs reveal themselves from source to mouth. This is not about homogeneity, but rather a delicate complexity of interleaving parts that communicate—or rather respond—to one another across its distance/duration.

Over the course of my fieldwork the Yarra became more than just a body of water—it was the cities, the histories, the waste, the flora and the fauna that its waters carved out and carried every day.

It was a companion whose form and presence was apparent in the thousands of tourist snapshots, as well as in the gaping architecture of The Atrium and the quiet moments spent perched on the bow of a boat.