Research Note 𖠵01: I Wish I Was a River
Last week, after finishing reading Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, I found myself thinking more about the Hindu tradition of cremation and the scattering of ashes in rivers. I began to imagine the countless lives that, over centuries and perhaps millennia, had been returned to those waters, becoming part of a larger flow.
A few days later, while preparing some still images from my video work I Wish I Was a River (2022), the thought came back.
I Wish I Was a River is constructed from still photographs made before, during and immediately after my father's death in 2019. The images are layered over video footage of a river filmed from above. Through a series of digital processes, the photographs drift in and out of visibility, emerging briefly in to another time and place before dissolving back into the current, the sound following the images as if moving in and out of a daydream.
When the work was first exhibited in my solo show at Belfast Exposed Gallery (2022), I spoke about the city's hidden rivers: the Farset and the Blackstaff, waterways that were covered over but still continue to flow beneath the streets. For me, they became a way of thinking about histories that continue to shape the present, and in particular in this city the legacy of the United Irishmen and, indirectly, how my father had traced his own political thinking back to their hopes for an Ireland that might think beyond religious division. Later, when the video was shown in a group show at Vision Art Platform Gallery in Istanbul in January 2026, I found myself making connections to the buried waterways beneath that historic city and the hidden histories of conquest and division that flowed there too.
As it all comes to mind this week, while another version of the work is being installed in Bodrum, Turkey, I realise that the river in the film has always been doing more than I previously understood. I had recognised it as a continuous flow, a way of thinking about memory not as something fixed and preserved, but as something in motion, continually remade. I understood the river as a carrier of histories, memories and traces of lives but what I had not seen then was that the river is itself being carried. Drawn onwards by a force larger than itself, moving inevitably towards the sea. Perhaps this is why it continues to resonate with me. The river reminds us that we are carried as much as we carry.
Mairéad McClean 2nd of June, 2026©️
Still from ‘I WISH I WAS A RIVER’ 2022