Something in the Water

20 Mar-30 Mar 2026

Overview

The expression ‘Something in the Water’ alludes to an unexplained commonality within a community or locality. Water as metaphor for an unseen force which carries, communicates, or creates bonds in the way it touches our lives.

Referencing themes of time, displacement, inheritance, and rupture, this online exhibition brings together four works which meditate on the porousness of life to the ecological and cultural environment in which it grows.

Films in the programme
‘Máthair’ by Keira Greene, 2024, 6 minutes 37 Seconds

‘Máthair’ begins with the story of an Irish woman who travelled to England in 1954 to give birth in secret in a Catholic Mother and Baby Home, returning to Ireland without her child. As the daughter of the child left behind, Keira Greene traces the matrilinear family history through the gaps in memory and record. The film moves between archival records, digital spaces and choreography to explore the emotional and bodily traces of intergenerational trauma, held by the landscape and the bodies of water between England and Ireland. 
 

‘just above the tear duct on each side’ by Cáit and Éiméar McClay, 2025, 20 minutes 

During the 1950s, Ireland had the highest rate of psychiatric hospital use in the world. This film examines the archival documents from the now defunct St. Conal’s Psychiatric Hospital in Letterkenny, Ireland to map carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic forces that shaped psychiatric institutions in the 20th century when care, control, and social management became deeply entangled in the Irish context. 
 

‘Scent Line of a Moving Mountain’ by Eiko Soga, 2025, 18 minutes

‘Scent Line on a Moving Mountain’ explores the transmission of embodied knowledge between the filmmaker, non human beings and Ainu elder Kane Kumagai through the practice of Samani Ainu cooking in Hokkaido, Japan. This knowledge is shared through communication with non-human-beings and eating together–a process Ms Kumagai calls “my mother’s everyday”. The film documents an indigenous way of living sustainably with the land, foregrounding forms of knowledge increasingly marginalised by Japan’s dominant, city-centric culture.
 

‘A Spider, Fever, and Other Disappearing Islands’ by Natalie Khoo, 2021, 21 minutes

‘A Spider, Fever and Other Disappearing Islands’ is an experimental documentary which connects the filmmaker’s grandmother’s migration from the Indonesian Riau Islands to Singapore with a spider spirit’s migratory route, where memories of colonial ghosts, sisterhood, and disappearance are woven together. Emerging through this melange of media forms is a re-imagined archipelagic and family history that reclaims the act of story-telling as simultaneously generative and fluid.
 

Artist Biography
Keira Greene is an artist working across film, installation, photography and performance. Her work is preoccupied with the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments. Her practice is produced through a collaborative and conversational approach of looking, writing and forming enduring relationships. Recent works are concerned with ideas of the body and the experience of emotion, in dialogue with an embodied filmmaking practice.

Cáit McClay and Éiméar McClay are Irish-born, collaborative artists currently based in London. Their recent work has analysed the cultural and political effects of the British Imperial project in Ireland by examining the period following the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. They have particularly focused on social institutions run by the Catholic church and the state across the 20th century, including Magdalene Laundries and mother and baby homes. Their work has been selected for exhibitions and festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Docs Ireland Documentary Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Festival du Noveau Cinéma, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Queer Lisboa, Nowe Horyzonty Film Festival, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, RSA New Contemporaries and CIRCA.

Eiko Soga is a UK-based Japanese artist and a lecturer, working with moving images, photography, poetry, and installation. Through her interdisciplinary projects, she explores the relationship between emotional and natural landscapes within the more-than-human world. She has completed her practice-led PhD, titled ‘Felt Knowledge: Ecologising Art and Samani Ainu Cooking’ at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Soga has shown her works internationally in exhibitions and screenings including Open City Documentary Festival, Pitt Rivers Museum, Modern Art Oxford, IKON Gallery, the Ethnographic Museum in Switzerland, and the Ichihara Art Museum in Japan. She is currently a Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellowship in Fine Art at University of Oxford.

Natalie Khoo is a filmmaker and programmer based in Singapore with a background in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her experimental documentary approach has garnered awards like best documentary and cinematography at the 4th Singapore Short hi Film Awards and screened at film festivals including London International Documentary Festival and Thai Short Film and Video Festival, including her debut short ON SUCH AND SUCH A DAY AT SUCH AND SUCH A TIME (2013), a semi-fictional portrait of her grandmother which explores the relationship between dreams and memory.  She participated in Docs by the Sea, organised by Tribeca Film Institute and In-Docs, Objectifs’ Short Film Lab, and is currently working on a short film produced by POTOCOL. Her latest work A SPIDER, FEVER AND OTHER DISAPPEARING ISLANDS (2021) recently screened as a video and sculptural installation at Objectifs WOMEN IN FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION 2021 and Kurzfilm Hamburg 2022 and screened in cinema form at Queer East Film Festival in London and Seashorts Film Festival in Kuala Lumpur, both in 2022.

Accessibility Information 
The films in this programme have open captioned versions available. 

For more information or to talk about access needs, please contact: [email protected]

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