Acknowledgement of Country and waters

This paper begins with an acknowledgement of Country, including waters here, above and below. This work was created on Aboriginal land and shared on Noongar Country, where Country refers to the living system of relationships between people, place, creatures, waters, sky, stories and kin. I pay my respects to elders past and present, I extend my deepest respects to all First Nations people, and recognise their continuing care of Country, water, sky and community.

I also acknowledge the importance of water within Indigenous knowledge systems, and their deep understanding of water not as resource but as kin, not as property but as Country. These cultural practices, scholarship and cosmologies of First Nations peoples’ relationship to water is a vast and deep area of cultural significance and study. As a non-Indigenous Australian, this is not my area of study, I am not the right person to do that, but the ideas I consider, such as thinking with water, have been and continue to be integral to Indigenous water relations here and in other First Nations cultures for all time. The First Nations water protectors and defenders, whose chant is sometimes Water is Life, live and fight for the deep and lasting relations between bodies of water.

There are many scholars, artists and curators whose work engages deeply with Indigenous water knowledge and First Nations water relations. This way of thinking of water as a vibrant and living material with its own agency is integral to many First Nations scholarships and cosmologies. As Stó:lō nation poet and writer Lee Maracle reminds us, “The water owns itself” (Maracle, Reference Maracle, Christian and Wong2017). This is not a metaphor; it is a truth held in Indigenous knowledge systems that we must learn to honour and enact. Of particular significance is the work of artist, curator and scholar Léuli Eshrāghi, whose practice centres Indigenous concepts of kinship and responsibilities spanning the Great Ocean. Eshrāghi’s curatorial work, including the Reference Eshrāghi2023 Tarrawarra Biennale, ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili, as well as their publication Indigenous Aesthetics and Knowledges for Great Ocean Renaissances (2023), offers vital frameworks for understanding oceanic thinking and Pacific sovereignty. Similarly, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s powerful installations on Sea Country, including Kinyingarra Guwinyanba demonstrate Indigenous leadership in caring for water and Country, as does Tongan-Australian artist Latai Taumoepeau, whose performance practice amplifies Pacific voices in the face of the climate crisis (Jetñil-Kijiner et al., Reference Jetñil-Kijiner, Raymond and Taumoepeau2021; Taumoepeau, Reference Taumoepeau2016)

Hydro(s)cenic methods in practice

The artists of the Hydrocene are showing us innovative methods to care for and with water. To become water stewards, these artists are cultural leaders who demonstrate ways of cultivating what Donna Haraway terms “response-ability” (Reference Haraway2016) and whose methods for collaborating with water, thinking with water, strengthen and deepen the possibilities of living within the natural-cultural climate crisis. Rather than seeing water as a theme, backdrop or a material to work with, the artists of the Hydrocene have developed water-based methodologies, what I call hydro-artistic methods, for entering principled and artistic relations with water. These methods are not a definitive or exhaustive list, but examples found in certain artists’ practices; there are many other possible and existing hydro-artistic methods to which the theory of the Hydrocene can pertain (Bailey-Charteris, Reference Bailey-Charteris2024).

Water moves through bodies internally and links bodies to the planetary circulations through the hydrological cycle. In this way, water is ingested and visceral: it is both internal and external to bodies. This duality of water as internally and externally sensed is one of the double-sided paradigms which means that water is also both a physical and metaphorical connector within this new wave of water-based arts practices. Water is the guide, the archive and the mediator for art to contribute to the cultural discourse on the climate crisis.

This understanding of the logic of water as “hydrologics” builds on Neimanis’s work in her essay “Water and Knowledge,” (Neimanis, Reference Neimanis2017) where she argues for the powerful logic and knowledge of water, and on her foundational concept of hydrofeminism, which reframes embodiment itself as watery (Neimanis, Reference Neimanis, Gunkel, Nigianni and Söderbäck2012, Reference Neimanis2017).

These modes of watery relations are what she terms “hydrologics”, which to my reading show us the ways bodies of water perform in transforming and exchanging with other bodies of water. Neimanis lists possible hydrologics and the list reads like transferrable skills on a curriculum vitae: communicator, conduit, memory-keeper, sculptor, differentiator, lover, scribe, alibi, genealogist and saboteur. What the list shows is that water is always already a relational agent. It communicates, sculpts, differentiates, sabotages. The challenge for us is to attend to what water is already doing, and to develop practices that respond to and attune with water’s agency.

These hydrologics suggest water itself could be seen here as a pedagogue. The hydro-artistic methods are artistic strategies and forms of environmental learning at once, operating through embodied encounter and more-than-human care. The three artists show us how to bring the learnings of water and water’s eco-systems out to the public. Their important artistic and scientific work practices attunement to immersion and watery ways, teaching us through encounter and reflection.

In my book, I outline the hydro-artistic methods of archiving, cleaning, incubating, infusing, misting, resisting, submerging, swamping, tiding, unfreezing and waving, which the artists themselves have developed in their unique relationships with water. This list is not exhaustive or exclusive, and many artists work with multiple methods across multiple states of water. These methods are slippery, water-based ways of thinking with water to make art in common. In this setting, water is not a passive material engaged by artists; it is a vibrant and active agent, through which art engages with the planetary circulations of the hydrological and hydro-social cycle.

The artists of the hydro(s)cene carry what we cannot hold alone. They hold water stories in their bodies and in their practices, and they offer them to us as shared knowing. The intricate curatorial task is to gather these carrier bags (Le Guin, Reference Le Guin1989) and arrange them so the water stories they hold can circulate.

Watery worlds do not emerge spontaneously. They are built through acts of bringing together, of making space for different waters to meet. Jo Pollitt, Helena Grehan and Renee Newman at the Centre for People, Place & Planet and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, curated a responsive roundtable and invited ECU researchers to bring their own watery practices into dialogue with the Hydrocene. Rather than presenting the Hydrocene as a finished theory to be received, I offered it as a body of water that might mingle with other bodies of water, each transforming the other through shared understandings. What follows is a selection of findings from this aqueous event.

Submerging: Kathryn McMahon in seagrass meadows

The research I do collaboratively is developing ways to care for the ocean differently. It is about developing climate actions for the ecosystem. The ocean is vast and regulates climate. It has an amazing capacity to absorb heat. Ninety percent of the excess heat trapped by earth due to human-caused global warming is absorbed by the ocean. So, the ocean is heating up much faster than the atmosphere and marine heatwaves, these extreme underwater weather events are causing rapid environmental degradation. You may have heard about coral bleaching and coral reef degradation from ocean warming but seagrasses, marine plants that live in coastal waters, are also impacted by heatwaves. In the amazing Gathaagudu, Shark Bay World Heritage Area, 1,000 square kilometres of seagrass was lost or degraded due to a marine heatwave. If like me, the number does not mean much, think about 670,000 Olympic Size swimming pools as the surface area.

In our research we use an experimental scientific approach to find seagrass species, places where seagrass grows or particular seagrass plants that are more likely to survive a marine heatwave. We put small pieces of plants in chambers, heat the chambers up and measure their health, a bit like a stress test but for plants. We have found species and places that are more tolerant. So now we are working with community to plant these into the ocean in restoration programmes to build resilience into our ecosystems. This community of seagrass planters aligns with Bailey-Charteris’s statement where the vast ocean is a place for collaboration and collective strategies of salty relationality and storytelling.

I connected with the hydro-artistic method of submerging as described in the Hydrocene book, knowing the ocean from inside-out. As part of my scientific research practice I SCUBA dive or snorkel to see and learn. It is incredibly immersive, skin covered in lycra or wetsuit, heavy on land with weight belts and air tanks but freed by the density of the water when submerged, moving effortlessly. It is a special way to relate and engage with water. When migratory whales, schooling rays or sea snakes pass by me I am reminded of and feel the connectedness of the ocean expanse. With my head down looking, counting, recording seagrass I am immersed in the ocean and learning from it. To me there were synergies with the artistic practice described by Bailey-Charteris as the hydro(s)cene. The ocean connects me, engages me and supports me in my learning and life – for me it is Eco-Science in the Hydrocene.

Kathryn McMahon shared in her presentation, that she was one of the first women marine scientists in her field, running her own boat, eventually bringing on more women crew and scientists (Figure 1). I could immediately see her out there, launching the boat, gathering samples, the bright blue skies above. Her description of being “freed by the density of the water when submerged, moving effortlessly” echoes the embodied knowledge that artists such as Signe Johannessen and Latai Taumoepeau cultivate through their watery encounters. Seagrass research can be done by remote sensing, drone survey, laboratory analysis, but McMahon chooses to learn from the inside, placing her body within the ecosystem so the ocean becomes not an object of measurement but a relational milieu.

Figure 1.

Photograph of McMahon undertaking seagrass research. Image courtesy of McMahon.

Figure 1. Long description

A person is scuba diving in a seagrass field, surrounded by tall, green seagrass blades. The diver is wearing a black wetsuit and a white scuba mask with a camera attached. The camera is pointed downward, capturing the underwater environment. The water is clear, allowing visibility of the seagrass and the diver’s movements.

She chose to end her presentation with a poem she had written while based up north, and it had this watery feeling, living with and through the water. It spoke to a release, a refusal of merely “studying” water in favour of learning from it. Her words reminded me of what Neimanis calls hydrofeminism, the insistence that our watery embodiment is always already political (Neimanis, Reference Neimanis, Gunkel, Nigianni and Söderbäck2012). This connects her practice to curatorial care: a shared commitment to embodied attention as a way of knowing water differently. McMahon’s community seagrass planting, researchers and locals working together in the water, is response-ability in practice (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016).

Listening: Mary Rapp at waterfalls

Water as mentor and catalyst

My relationship with water in my artistic practice began unexpectedly: in my second year as a jazz double bass student at the Sydney Conservatorium, I heard a performance by Bae Il Dong, the extraordinary p’ansori singer from South Korea . P’ansori is a 400-year-old musical storytelling tradition, recognised by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity, a raw, resonant, intensely textured vocal art. Il Dong’s performance moved me profoundly; I had never heard anything like it. So, despite never having sung before, I travelled to Korea to study under Il Dong, who has now been a friend and mentor for 15 years (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Image of Retroreflection waterfalls by Rapp with Chris Abrahams, Carl Dewhurst, Peter Farrar. Courtesy of the artists. https://maryrapp.bandcamp.com/album/retroreflection-waterfalls.

Figure 2. Long description

A black and white photograph captures a geometric sculpture situated in a dense forest. The sculpture, composed of interlocking triangular panels, stands on a raised platform supported by four legs. The surrounding trees create a natural backdrop, their trunks and branches forming a textured pattern. In the foreground, a waterfall cascades down a series of rocks, adding a dynamic element to the scene. The interplay of light and shadow enhances the contrast between the geometric sculpture and the organic environment.

Witnessing: Natalie Davey in floodwaters

Natalie Davey’s short film River Report (2024) bears witness to the 2023 flooding of Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia, where unprecedented wet season rainfall transformed the Fitzroy River into a force of destruction and displacement. Over five days, Davey filmed her home flooding and the river’s power in real time (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Still image from Davey’s video work, River Report, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 3. Long description

A flooded street scene with murky brown water covering the road. Several cars are partially submerged, with only their roofs visible above the water. On the right side, a person in a small boat is navigating through the floodwaters. In the background, there are trees and houses, some of which are also affected by the flooding. The sky is overcast, indicating recent or ongoing heavy rainfall.

Davey’s practice of documenting the flood in real time enacts a form of witnessing that resonates with the Hydrocene method of archiving, her camera becomes its own archiving instrument, capturing the Fitzroy River’s power as it unfolds. As a First Nations person and artist, Davey shares her lived experience of the flood and the river as family. She crafts the video through documentary footage, to-camera pieces but also hand-drawn animations which together make a powerful aesthetic remembering and witnessing of the flood. River Report reminds us that the natural-cultural water crisis is a lived reality, and that bearing witness, in all its difficulty, is itself a form of response-ability.

Davey’s contribution here does not take written form. The film itself is the testimony, her work with documentary practice and community witnessing, makes space for the voices most directly affected by the water crisis.

The artistic and scientific practices above demonstrate what it can look and feel like to think with water (Chen et al, Reference Chen, Macleod and Neimanis2013). In looking at these practices, we also need to understand how we got here. The following section maps four pillars of the natural-cultural water crisis: the dominant systems of thought that have alienated us from water and that the Hydrocene, through its artists and collaborators, seeks to disrupt.

Pillars of the natural-cultural water crisis

Continuing to view the climate crisis as an intersecting axis, as the product of colonialism, imperialism and late capitalism, and to give a greater context to the natural-cultural water crisis, I consider four “pillars” or socio-cultural belief systems that have contributed to the crisis development. These are the ideas that uphold the dominant colonial-capital and anthropocentric understandings of water, which the Hydrocene seeks to disrupt (Bailey-Charteris, Reference Bailey-Charteris2024). These are the logics that McMahon’s seagrass meadows, Rapp’s waterfalls and Davey’s floodwaters push against.

Water as modern

The first pillar is the modernisation of water. Sophisticated First Nations hydrological tools have been developed and utilised as technology for millennia; for example in the form of the fish traps at Brewarrina in New South Wales, known to the Ngemba people as Baiame’s Ngunnhu (Department of Climate Change, 2021). This Indigenous hydrology site manages fish populations and practises sustainable fishing, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the interconnected ecologies of fish, river and humans (Martin et al., Reference Martin, Chanson, Bates, Keenan-Jones and Westaway2023). Compare this with the current Murray–Darling Basin Plan, where water is managed in spreadsheets and allocations of fictional water are traded on markets while actual rivers run dry (Hamilton & Kells, Reference Hamilton and Kells2021).

Theorist Veronica Strang writes about the process of “domesticating water” that took place as part of the expansion of European cities during industrialisation, where the power to control water access and sanitation was keenly interlinked with the power of the church and state. This notion of domesticated water or “modern water” marks a shift in the collective understanding of water within cultural and social arrangements (Linton, Reference Linton2014; Strang, Reference Strang2015).

In Australia, this transformation was and is particularly violent. The extreme changes to the Australian water landscape inflicted by settler colonialism is enabled, in part, by the importation of European water management and even naming. Jay Arthur highlights how imported European English has mislabelled Australian bodies of water. Terms such as “lake” and “river” suit the hydrological environs of Europe, not Australia, and “reflect the discrepancy in the settler understanding of this place” (Arthur, Reference Arthur, Rose and Davis2005, pp. 85–89).

Water as resource

The second pillar emerges directly from the first. When dominant cultures treat efficiency, profit and progress as given, water becomes invisible, reduced to a “resource” to be contained, commodified and instrumentalised (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Macleod and Neimanis2013). In Australia, water trading has separated water from land, allowing institutional investors and foreign pension funds to acquire vast permanent water rights in the Murray–Darling Basin (Hamilton & Kells, Reference Hamilton and Kells2021). The ACCC’s, 2021 water markets inquiry concluded that Australia’s water market had failed the environment, farmers and Indigenous Australians (ACCC, 2021). The resource mindset is also domestic, habitual, bodily. We have outsourced our water relations to infrastructure, often forgetting that we too are part of this planetary hydro-social system (Budds et al., Reference Budds, Linton and McDonnell2014). As Linton (Reference Linton2014) argues, “abstract water” strips water of its situated relations, reducing it to a tradeable unit.

Chen, MacLeod and Neimanis write about how through water the otherwise invisible phenomena of climate change become “immediately tangible” and that “at the slower but epochal scale of acidifying oceans, changed currents, wet-land encroachment, and desertification, we are also part of watery transformations” (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Macleod and Neimanis2013, p. 5). McMahon’s community seagrass planting works against this logic, returning water relations to the local and the embodied.

Water as (only) weather

The third pillar reduces water to meteorological phenomena divorced from political and social contexts, ignoring the ongoing “slow violence” of the hydrological cycle in the climate crisis (Nixon, Reference Nixon2011).

Christina Sharpe offers another lens, “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies” (Sharpe, Reference Sharpe2016). Sharpe’s use of climate is figurative: she names the pervasive atmosphere of antiblackness. I draw on her work not to conflate racial violence with ecological crisis but to show how elemental phenomena are never separate from social life. If weather carries the histories Sharpe describes, water carries them too: in the uneven distribution of flood risk, in colonial infrastructure that determines who drinks clean water, in the slow violence of contaminated waterways in communities already marginalised by race and class.

Hamilton, Neimanis and Zettel propose a feminist figuration of “weathering” which “attunes us to human embodiment and difference in a time of climate change, where ‘weather’ is not only meteorological, but the total atmospheres that bodies are made to bear” (Hamilton et al., Reference Hamilton, Neimanis and Zettel2021). As Hito Steyerl declares in her video work Liquidity Inc (2014): “Weather is money. Weather is terror. Time is money… Weather is water with an attitude” (Steyerl, Reference Steyerl2014). Steyerl’s work sits at the nexus of water, data and financial flows that the Hydrocene seeks to make visible. Davey makes this visible in her filmmaking of the flood when she records, animates and shares the social and cultural stories of her familial river and the water in flood.

Water as data

The fourth pillar represents the newest form of water alienation: the datafication of water and the computational consumption of water resources. A wet-techno fantasy that with enough data we can manage water and all its power. Meanwhile, the digital cloud has a very material thirst in the form of data centres which maintain our digital lives and consume millions of litres of water daily. For example, in Western Sydney, down the mountains an hour or two from my home, temperatures regularly hit 40 degrees, all while new data centres are planned that will soon compete with communities for water access. In England’s recent drought the population was asked to clear old photos to relieve the data infrastructure of water, and in Texas folks have been asked to take shorter showers while the data centres drink up water supplies (Newsweek and The Independent, 2025). Rapp’s waterfall training refuses this logic: she learns from water by being inside its sound. In the Hydrocene, these digital and computational practices continue to emerge, allowing potential for an eco-technological intimacy to occur.

Final water thoughts, the evaporation returns

How, then, do we move from thinking about water to thinking with water as artistic, cultural and curatorial agent? This is where the Hydrocene emerges, and where the constellation and zeitgeist of watery artists become essential guides in developing new and remembered hydro-relations across all four pillars of the crisis. Here, through a curated gathering of practitioners from within and beyond contemporary art, we test whether the hydro(s)cene can hold water beyond our own hands.

The Hydrocene is a way of building a small posthuman refuge towards counteracting the dominant anthropocentric understandings of water (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016). Based on my findings as a curator, I hypothesise this neologism as a curatorial act of establishing a name among many, and watery alternative to the Holocene, Anthropocene and others. Rather than a strict geological era or linear time-based matter, the Hydrocene is proposed as a conceptual tool and as one of many alternative names for the current epoch and aims to disrupt the supremacy and land-based logic of the Anthropocene (Bailey-Charteris, Reference Bailey-Charteris2024).

The Hydrocene responds to TJ Demos’s call for an expansion of the names of this planetary age (Demos, Reference Demos2017). It aims to be one of many slippery names for the current times, a conceptual tool for understanding and elevating water, art and culture in the current times. The Hydrocene brings together “watery makers” in contemporary art with “watery thinkers” in the expanded environmental humanities, and becomes a way to enact Karen Barad’s “reconfigurings of the world” in theory and practice (Barad, Reference Barad2012).

The Hydrocene asks us to stay with the water, after Haraway. To cup it in our hands even as it leaks through. As environmental education meets the scale of this crisis, it may need to follow the water out of the classroom and into these artistic, scientific and more-than-human encounters. In sharing in these works, we notice new and remembered ways for the boundary between ourselves and water to evaporate and return. The practitioners gathered here are showing us how we might do this and what it feels like to be waterlogged, and return again, in watery worlds.