We are intimately connected with water. As aqueous beings, our bodies are composed mainly of this substance; mediating chemical, metabolic, lymphatic, and cellular reactions within. We drink this solution, but we do not all thirst equally. Through the act of ingestion, water infiltrates our system, working its way down the oesophagus, flowing through our blood stream into our tissues and regenerates our cells, ensuring that our being is invariably sustained. We are conceived through the exchange of fluids, and gestate in amniotic waters that deliver us nutrients and enact the process of genesis. In this circulation of fluid, we are porous; absorbing, leaking, dripping, sipping, seeping, and pooling. We ebb and flow between taking in the world and sending it surging back out as fluvial deposits; of matter and meaning. We are not separate from our bodies and the waters that flow within. Neither are we from nature. Nature surrounds us, it is us, and it becomes us. Humans are inescapably entwined with the natural world through its intrinsic link to our survival, from our consumption of nutrients to our ability to breathe. We must then relinquish any lingering illusion of nature as separate. Nature constructs us and we construct nature – dominating, exploiting and patronising. Water often retains the anthropomorphic matter of our influence, acting as an archive of our disruption of the ecological assemblage. As our rivers no longer reach the sea, as our oceans warm up, as we pollute and spill petroleum into our waterways, and as we commodify drinking water, there seems to be now more than ever, the necessity to reflect upon and reconnect to our landscape. Zorica Purlija’s The Fall is a series of composite photographs of Australian rivers and waterfalls, where fragments of ephemeral moments are digitally overlayed to create dreamlike montages. The landscape is aestheticised through a visual language where the surface topography of the image has been constructed to present nature as something that is transmutable and shifting – changing, changed – at the hands of humanity. These incongruous landscapes are both foreign and familiar, rendered transitional due to its interstitial existence between dual reference points; this and that, here and there, then and now. Featuring an embodied installation of dye sublimation on metal and silk chiffon prints, The Fall immerses the viewer into the depths and grandeur of the natural world. The juxtaposition of this materiality further emulates the fluidity and flux of our terrain and alludes to the hybridity that has resulted within our organic equilibria. Impulsively, we often overlay our perspectives, memories, and sensations onto water, observing a reflection of ourselves within its liquid architecture, where we are confronted with our innate humanness and the implication of our actions on the world around us. Through this photographic series, and in particular the work I’ve got you (2023), it seems as if Purlija is asking us to submerge ourselves; to shed one’s clothes, to take the plunge, to bathe, to be amongst the flowing waters. Whereby, she urges us to recognise the interconnectedness of nature and the ontological equivalence among all beings; sentient or otherwise.

The Fall reminds us that we must find respite in nature and question reciprocity and co-existence in order to move towards a more sustainable eco-future in which there is the imposition to heal and become symbiotic with nature, or risk falling into the deep end. We as humans are not separate from nature and the waters that flow in, from, and between us. Without water, there is no being, or becoming.

As it is water that buoys our flesh.          

Written by Sarah Rose ––––––––––––––––––––– Sarah Rose is a Sydney-based curator and arts worker currently working at Artspace as the Associate Curator. In recent years, she has curated extensively across independent and council-run spaces, collaborating closely with artists to develop group and solo exhibitions. Most recently, she was featured as a ‘Tastemaker' in Art Collector Magazine’s 50 Things Collectors Should Know issue (Jan-Mar 2023), and her curated exhibition In the fibre of her being (2021-22) at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery received a 2022 MGNSW IMAGinE Award. Rose holds a Masters of Curating & Cultural Leadership with Excellence and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction from UNSW Art & Design.