This work explores the sacredness and growing scarcity of healthy water bodies and the disruption to water systems caused by the ecological crisis. The fountain is a piece of place-based interactive illustration created for the Storybox Collective’s Autumn 2025 exhibition at National Trust property Ham House. Ham House is nestled into a crook of the river Thames, in Richmond, London. The entrance to the site is dominated by a sculpture of the river God ‘Father Thames’. In contrast to this somewhat overbearing, patriarchal and capitalist symbol I have created ‘Mother Thames’, whose sculptural form takes inspiration from the natural world and pregnant body, honouring acts of nurture, harmony, reciprocity and vitality.

Visitors were invited to interact with the fountain by placing a ceramic ‘votive offering’ into the bowls, taking a moment to pledge to take one action that improves a water body that they feel deeply connected to. The fountain acts as a vessel to encase our worries and wishes about water, the most significant natural resource in our lives.

Mother Thames has been hand-built using coiling, throwing and slab building techniques, and then single fired and waxed. Water will seep into its open pores and impregnate it. Terracotta can be used as a natural filter to purify water, this contrasts to the materiality of Father Thames, which is made from an extremely hard and low-porosity ceramic called Coade Stone, a ceramic that is water-resistant and very slow to weather.

The fountain was then exhibited ‘dry’ at the annual CCW PhD Festival at Chelsea College of art in October 2025. By altering the context of the weather worn terracotta and removing it from the place it was created for (outside and under the influence of the elements) the nature of the fountain changed, the absence of running water mimicked the increasingly ferocious droughts of British Summers, the lack of sun to power the pump removed the motion from the fountain, as though the life had also been removed from it, it became a mere record of its former existence.