Bodies in Water at PINK

An aquatic dragon, a sunken town, a cruel giant that rules beneath the water: there’s a lot of folklore attached to Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake). In a way, these monsters show us up to be very human. Much of the time, they’re placeholders for our anxieties, for the unknown in the murky water. They’re manifestations of what a body feels when it can’t see the bottom – the disorientation, the cold, the sense that something might be down there that isn’t. It’s a theme pregnant with possibility, and greenandowens, the Manchester-based duo of Katheryn Owens and Chris Green, are running with it.

Owens and Green completed a joint PhD in 2023, built on autoethnography (research grounded in the researchers’ own lived experience) and what they call friendship as method, originally focused on the precarity of millennial working life. Their attention has since shifted to human relationships with water, using an expanded definition of swimming as a way of thinking with, being with, and being in water. The wider research project carries the working title The Body in Water: A Study of Embodiment, Performance Writing and Radical Care, and sits within the blue humanities – a field that draws on art, literature and cultural history to reconsider what oceans, lakes and rivers mean to us.

Bodies in Water, this new exhibition at PINK, is the first public outing of that research, built from time spent at and around the lake itself. Sound, text, moving image and sculptural objects sit together in the Stockport space, holding Llyn Tegid’s folklore – the dragon, the sunken town, the lights beneath the water – alongside the artists’ own embodied encounter with the lake.

Once your eyes adjust, what the exhibition asks seems quite straightforward: to think of water not as landscape or resource, but as a place of memory, myth and embodied experience.