Like the proverbial iceberg, Eloise Hawser’s new exhibition is more about what lurks beneath the water than above it. Dredging up data on H20 from historical records, medical imaging and the sewerage system, the idea is to show a connection between the passage of water in the Thames and the flow of fluid in our bodies. Meaning: if there’s something in the water, then there’s something in you too.
To do this, Hawser starts with the history of London’s liquid lifeline. On the floor of rooms one and two is a digital print of a 1928 Port of London Authority river survey. Created to record water depth, the interesting thing now is that the map overlaps with the area Somerset House is on. With the real-life Thames visible out the Terrace Room windows, Hawser’s basic point is clear; the city’s history, the modern river and the person walking through the exhibition link together.
It’s here that the ghostly and unsettling feeling that drips through the exhibition is also created. Waterbabies we might be, but the artist is eager to demonstrate the destructive power of the river. There’s a silkscreen image of stone lions used to monitor rising tides and the accompanying warning, ‘When The Lions Drink, London Will Sink…’. More worrying still is the Cholera Map from 1849, with the diseased areas marked out in bright blue splodges (South London is the worst off, being a giant Rorschach blob of infection).
Yet despite being all about diving beneath the surface, parts of the exhibition are frustratingly impenetrable. Medical ‘phantoms’ (machines and models used to analyse body liquids) haunt the space. Some, like the ‘Virtual Human Male Pelvis Phantom’ are fascinating and enjoyably creepy, whilst the meaning of others is as murky and unfathomable as Bankside silt.
What does work though, is Hawser’s insistence that by sharing a substance there’s an almost-mythical connection between Londoners and their river - you can almost feel it in your waters.