Fæthm, Fæþm – noun, m (nominative plural fæþmas):
1. Outstretched arms; embrace, bosom.
Kelham Island Museum takes its name from the spit of land it stands on, which is cradled by two arms of water just north of Sheffield city centre. The River Don is on the north side, a South Yorkshire waterway that is the central focus of fæthm. It rises in the Pennines and flows east through Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster and many towns between until it joins the Ouse in the East Riding. Kelham Island’s ‘goit’ is to the south, a human-made channel that dates back to precursory industry in Sheffield during the Norman era, when it was used to divert water to the Town Corn Mill. After the Don burst its banks in the summer of 2007, the contaminated goit was dredged and converted into a wildlife haven.
Inside the exhibition, I was struck by the liveliness of the atmosphere, with a surprising number of people trickling in for a weekday afternoon of introductory talks. The show, curated by Amy Carter Gordon and produced by Lauren McConnell, consisted of works by Dr. Rose Butler & Rob Gawthrop, Prof. David Cotterrell, Joanne Lee and Joanna Rucklidge installed in an upstairs space in the museum, along with a ‘live citizen science lab’ and a podcast. After introductions by the curator, a short set of opening remarks by Alban Krashi and Jonny Douglas of the River Dôn Project, who partnered on the project, made it clear that the show and its associated projects were premised on the understanding that our alienation from nature is due to persistent and pervasive cultural constructs. Each artist then discussed their work, followed by the reading of a winding, rhythmic river poem by Harriet Tarlo.
There was a clear sense of engagement with how the Don had changed over time. Previously deemed ‘biologically dead’ following decades of unfettered industrial use – tales of which included arsenic being dumped straight into the river – the Don has regenerated massively since the 1960s. While it still needs further protection, it is now healthy enough to house an array of plant and animal life, as well as fish like roach, perch, barbel, eels, crayfish and even Atlantic salmon. The installation ‘Wherever the river may take us / wherever it wants us to go’ (2025) by Joanne Lee brought together photographs, salvaged river debris, books and contextual materials with a poetic text by the artist. During her talk, Lee mentioned being one of Sheffield’s River Rangers – a network of city residents who volunteer to regularly monitor and protect the health of local rivers through training and citizen science initiatives – which means she regularly accesses the Don and was able to develop the work through repeated visual and temporal essaying of the river and its tributaries, exploring its slow cyclical processes and sudden periods of transition. Many other attendees and artists seemed to be woven into these tightly associated nature and volunteer networks: the sense of energy that resulted from instances of happenstance and overlap with one another’s work while developing the show was palpable, and a highlight of attending the exhibition. One of the lab scientists told me how, as a newcomer to Sheffield, they’d been told that it was ‘England’s biggest village’ because of its particular sense of interlocking community.
2. Fathom (measurement); around six feet. The distance covered by the arms outstretched.
In the back of the exhibition space was a ‘live lab’: a table staffed by scientists in white coats where visitors could ‘experience hands-on water quality research and learn about the state of [Sheffield’s] rivers’. I admit to being biased against such things – reactionary, even. I am against the general societal privileging of STEM and see anything that subtly positions art as science’s handmaiden – deploying exhibitions as ‘cultural engagement’, as though the arts were valuable only for their ability to pre-digest Real Scientific Facts for the wider public – as complicit in this. So, a churlish part of me perhaps wanted to find fault with the live lab – but it was incredibly fun. The lab’s researchers spoke animatedly about the local waterways, ready to listen and to share their enthusiasm for how microbiology and chemistry can indicate the health of the rivers. Visitors could quality-test by smearing water from a chosen vial (samples from all five of Sheffield’s rivers were available) onto a cultured petri dish. Scientists Ruth Franklin and Dr. Rachel Schwartz-Narbonne encouraged me to draw something with my swab of the Rivelin. I must have been infected by the lively atmosphere of the exhibition, because I found myself drawing an amoeba while loudly talking about the parasite I once feared had entered my eye after swimming in Hampstead Ponds wearing contact lenses – laughing as I described the subsequent hypochondriac summer spent catastrophising indoors and telling various doctors to ‘look again as I DEFINITELY HAVE THE AMOEBA’.
Some artists engaged closely with this scientific aspect of the show, with varying degrees of literalism. David Cotterrell’s contraption ‘BIDE’ (2025), displayed on the Don itself, consisted of a leaky boat that slowly took on water only to bail itself out just before completely sinking, its drawn-out moment of suspended distress accurately described as a ‘slow melodrama’. Experimental prints and drawings by Joanna Rucklidge featured elements and materials inspired by the Don, with repetitive visual references to riverfly larvae and the plastic often found littering the banks.
‘Ground Truths’ (2025) by Rose Butler captured traces of silt, fig leaves, hemlock and a New Year’s Eve rave along the river’s edge through a series of large, curled photographs installed on barrel-like plinths, alongside 16mm film works made in collaboration with Rob Gawthrop. The photographs had been processed using phenols from a remarkable and unlikely grove of mature Mediterranean fig trees growing on the Don’s banks, just within sight of Meadowhall. The trees began growing there during the height of the Industrial Revolution, when fig biscuits were popular in the Steel City. At that time, much of the steel-making industry took place on the banks of the Don, its waters drawn into the factories to cool molten metal and then dumped, still warm, back into the river. Like those of the tomato, fig seeds are endozoochorous, retaining the ability to germinate after passing through the digestive system. Once released into the Don through city sewerage, the post-industrial warmth of the water provided the ideal conditions for them to germinate and grow. Thanks to a campaign by local ecologists, the trees were protected in 1991, the UK’s only ‘alien’ plant species to be given such status.
3. A closed hand; a fist. Envelopment, grasp, control, power.
There’s a question underpinning this exhibition: what would it mean for the river to have rights? Comms around the show refer broadly to ‘exploring co-curation’ with the River Don and ‘fæthm[ing] the unquantifiable depths of the Dôn with the rights of nature as our praxis’. The first instance of a waterway gaining legal personhood occurred in 2017, when the Whanganui River in New Zealand made history by doing so. Despite other rivers subsequently being granted personhood – including the Magpie in Canada, the Laje in the Brazilian Amazon, the Ganges and Yamuna in India and all the rivers of Bangladesh – no body of water in the UK has been given such status, though outrage against the devastating effects of water privatisation and industrial runoff has been growing for years.
Such legislative routes are steps toward recognising nature’s need to be protected, acknowledging it as more than human property or a resource for exploitation. Pushing these concepts into public awareness as ways to combat environmental degradation in the UK is a worthwhile endeavour in its own right. Every piece of work in fæthm was concerned with pollution and environmental degradation, spotlighting the categorical instabilities of ‘nature’ and ‘industry’ implicit in the show’s setting. The works by Butler and Lee highlighted especially interesting feedback loops between environmental change, capitalism and extraction. Butler’s showcased not only how industry and its legacies can intervene in and produce local ecosystems, but also explored non-hegemonic occupations of space on the Don, examining illicit riverbank raves and speaking with people seeking asylum who are temporarily housed nearby. Lee’s works were rich in references to workers’ histories, displaying a clear preoccupation with overlapping energy cycles and transmutation that Marx might characterise as metabolism.
But I would have welcomed a more overt curatorial acknowledgement of how the Don’s issues fit into a global picture, including the conceptual debt that the show’s premise owes to the various Indigenous peoples whose cultures underpin the ethical and philosophical foundation of the ‘rights of nature’ framework. The Māori people of the Whanganui River fought to protect it for more than 160 years before gaining victory. In 2021, the Magpie River was the first in Canada to be granted legal personhood – and rights including the rights to flow, to be safe from pollution and to sue – following a coalition campaign led by Innu people of Ekuanitshit. Both waterways had been degraded by centuries of systematic extraction due to colonisation by settlers from European countries, and protecting them from further degradation under the infrastructural legacies of those settlers is a mitigating measure that barely scratches the surface of the reparative work needed. Only in Danaé Wellington’s poetry and some other audio fragments in the beautiful, polyvocal ‘Wild Medicine River Dôn Special’ podcast (by Sophie Toes and Ali Makavelli in collaboration with CiviCast) did I hear a real engagement with the Indigenous roots of the rights of nature. Given Britain’s outsized complicity in such issues worldwide, the absence of a foregrounding of that conceptual inheritance felt like something of a curatorial gap.
I’d also be interested to see a subsequent iteration of this project really lean into the sticky complexities that drawing such equivalences brings. What would recognising the rights of nature mean in the UK? For the people of the Whanganui and Magpie rivers, there is enduring, extant kinship – these rivers are literal relatives and ancestors, so the legislative protections only enshrine the knowledge of personhood that’s already a cultural and cosmological certainty. It was clear that many people in Sheffield already care for their waterways and are deeply involved with them, but a phenomenal and revolutionary shift would need to take place across the UK for anything approaching such a radically different worldview to be meaningfully implemented here, where even those who love the outdoors often see it as a work or leisure space. Projects like fæthm offer important access to new understandings of how we might think about nature and our place in the world. While the approaches to nature they offer will be appealing to many, truly implementing them requires unpicking the much deeper underpinnings of our culture, which is built on the oppression of women, children, trans people, migrants and minorities – by the very same attitudes and infrastructural mechanisms that disenfranchise natural entities and animals.
To see how projects like this work best, we can return to the word fæthm through its cognates: the Old Saxon faþmos; the Dutch vadem, vaam; the German Faden (and Old High German fadum), Old Norse faðmr (Icelandic faðmur, Danish favn, Swedish famn). The Proto-Indo-European root is also the source of the Ancient Greek πετάννυμι (petánnumi) and Latin pateō. These mirror-words show recurrent concerns across time and geography, with deep resonances between them. At their strongest, projects like fæthm look outward and do the same, identifying their place in a tapestry of such interconnected struggles globally and bringing those links to the foreground. Rivers are not static or inward-looking. It’s in their very nature to reach outwards from the land; they rush towards the open sea, the territorial boundaries of which water does not recognise.
Jay Drinkall is a writer and editor from Humberside.
Fæthm was at Kelham Island Museum and the River Don, Sheffield, 13 – 16 March 2025.
Published 11.06.2025 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
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