The Heavy Water Collective (HWC) comprises three women artists: Victoria Lucas, Maud Haya-Baviera and Joanna Whittle. Their project draws from archives and museum collections across the UK and beyond to reclaim historical narratives in a contemporary context.
“The materiality of heavy water is mystical”
Heavy Water Collective takes its name from a form of water with a unique atomic structure that is often used for the stabilisation of volatile matter. The materiality of Heavy Water (D2O) is mystical; permeating organic bodies. It calms violent creations, grounding and giving weight to something fluid and intangible. It is representative of the processes of investigation and methods of making developed in response to shared subject matter.
Heavy Water Collective have had an exhibition at GroundWork Gallery in 2024. Here they presented a body of work bringing together research developed primarily in response to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge.
Reimaginaing our connection to landscapes under threat
This exhibition re-imagined our connection to material landscapes that have been explored, exploited, or are under threat. Imagining what might be, while reflecting on and revitalising traces of the past, is a vital process of evaluative revisioning that is currently lacking in the context of late capitalism.
Heavy Water Collective believe that there is intrinsic value in imaginative reflection, because it enables one to creatively reveal and explore what is at stake.
Re-mythologising
Imagining and re-mythologising post-industrial and pre-industrial landscapes through artefacts in this way provides a gentle emphasis that conceptually entangles humans to the land through its materiality. Mystery and myth are buried back into the land through artistic practice here, in a way that re-conceptualises them in a time of environmental crisis.
