Meet the Artist
N.D. Rivers
I am an artist and poet working with words, found materials and fragments of the natural world.
My practice moves between poetry, painting, mixed media, handmade paper, resin, objects and whatever else the work asks to become. I collect shells from beaches, plants from paths, fallen pieces of the landscape, scraps, beads, old things and ordinary things. I am interested in what happens when they are carried somewhere else and given another life.
There is no clean division between the writing and the making.
A poem might become an object.
A walk might become a photograph.
Something found beside a river might end up embedded in paper.
An idea might need paint, thread, resin, moss or light before I understand what I was trying to say.
I think of it as a living practice.
It changes because I change.
Made by these hands
My hands are not particularly reliable.
Disability and chronic pain are part of the physical reality in which I make. My hands shake. They hurt. Sometimes they lose strength or precision. There are days when the thing I can see perfectly in my head is considerably more difficult to persuade my body to make. There are days where the fog in my mind makes planning impossible and the hands make what they want to make.
I don't mention this because I want the work to be admired for being difficult.
I mention it because the difficulty is in the work.
These pieces are touched, adjusted, dropped, sanded, remade, abandoned, returned to and occasionally sworn at. They carry the evidence of the body that made them.
For a long time I thought making something well meant removing that evidence.
I'm less interested in doing that now.
A crooked edge can stay.
A bubble in resin can become weather.
A mark can become part of the landscape.
Something that didn't behave as expected can become the beginning of the piece rather than its failure.
My hands have taught me that control and creation are not the same thing.
The work is not made despite the body.
The body is part of how the work is made.
A practice of paying attention
Much of my work begins outside.
Forests. Rivers. Coastlines. Weather. Things washed ashore or growing somewhere inconvenient. The tiny ecosystems we walk past without noticing.
I am fascinated by transformation: things weathered, broken, buried, carried and remade.
Perhaps because I recognise something in that.
I don't want to make perfect representations of the natural world. I want to work with it — to preserve fragments of it, rearrange it, write alongside it and sometimes build small impossible worlds from it.
There is seriousness here, but there is play too.
Actually, play may be one of the most serious parts.
I want to remain curious enough to pick up the strange shell. To follow the path. To make something without knowing whether it will work. To believe that an ordinary object can become a relic if we pay enough attention to it.