Follow Y/Our River — Lea-minal Edges Prompts for Transitory States of Being

Follow Y/Our River — Lea-minal Edges: Prompts for Transitory States of Being is an open artist’s book by paula roush, tamara stoll and hḗrā santos, developed through walking, photography and situated research along the River Lea in East London. Bringing together foldable books, loose folios, cyanotype cards and photographic works, it invites a non-linear reading shaped by movement, encounter and transformation. The digital edition preserves the different page sizes and scales of the original physical publication.

Follow Y/Our River — Lea-minal Edges: Prompts for Transitory States of Being is an artist’s book developed through walking, photography and situated research along the River Lea in East London.

The project began in autumn 2022 as a collaborative artist-led residency along the Lea Valley. Moving through the river’s ecological, industrial and social landscapes, paula roush, tamara stoll and hḗrā santos explored the liminal conditions of the river and its edges through photography, walking, relational portraiture, archival research and site-responsive actions.

The term lea-minal emerged through this research to describe the shifting boundaries encountered along the River Lea: between land and water, human and more-than-human life, industrial infrastructure and ecological regeneration, visibility and invisibility, and different states of bodily and environmental transformation.

Rather than taking the form of a conventionally bound and sequential book, Lea-minal Edges was conceived as an open book within an enclosure. Its individual components can be handled, unfolded, rearranged and read in different sequences, inviting the reader to create their own constellation of images, texts, encounters and prompts.

The publication brings together several interconnected works:

Three Ways — three foldable pocket books developed through walks along different sections of the River Lea;

Lea wateryquery — a photographic and textual inquiry across various river locations;

Sixteen Points of Connection — two books tracing encounters with people, animals and other inhabitants of the river;

follow y/our river — three cyanotype cards offering prompts for transitory states of being;

Nine Nodes — a constellation of 19 loose folios bringing together photographic, ecological, archival and embodied research.

Across these elements, the river becomes more than a subject to be represented. It operates as a method for thinking through movement, transformation and relation. The book invites forms of reading that mirror the river itself: non-linear, mobile and open to unexpected connections.

A note on the digital edition

The original artist’s book is composed of multiple printed elements produced at different formats and scales, including foldable posters, books and booklets, loose folios and cards.

This digital edition brings these elements together in a single PDF while retaining their original page dimensions. As you move through the PDF, pages will therefore appear at different sizes. This variation is intentional: it reflects the material and editorial structure of the physical artist’s book and forms part of the reading experience.

The PDF can be navigated normally in a PDF reader, while preserving the changing scale and format of the individual works that constitute the open book.

Publication details

Photography and texts: paula roush, tamara stoll + hḗrā santos

Editorial design: paula roush + tamara stoll

Typesetting: The Modern Designer

Production assistance: IC Visual Lab; Swap studio

Published by: msdm publications + road less travelled press

Year: 2023

Original physical edition: 100 copies

ISBN: 978-1-7390996-4-0

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Supported by the School of Arts and Creative Industries / Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University.

Digital edition: PDF