River, Records & Robert Adam
The drawings are my own navigational aids to the Water of Leith, the river whose mill leads spun into action Edinburgh’s industry and the Scottish Enlightenment.
They depict the waters flooding Edinburgh’s Registry House, designed by Robert Adam, one of the first completed buildings of Edinburgh’s New Town. The Registry House, keeper of Edinburgh’s land ownership records and their boundaries, stored as sasines, is stretched, folded and cut away as the river seeks its own path out of Adam’s Neo-Classical architectures. Though not flooded by the waters themselves but rather, a drawing of the waters – drawn at 1:1 scale. It is the result of an investigation into the ownership of the Water of Leith and the lineaments which proscribe it – how our marks, our drawings begin to produce, through their own logics, the boundaries, fences and other impositions in the real places they describe. The drawings are thus both conventional and perverse, the river contorting, in plan, section and axonometric, the very rubrics which seek to contain it. A mischievous revenge.
