My Wits or Salts, Chapters 1-3, 2025
HD video,Commissioned by Focal Point Gallery& Big Screen Southend
Chapter One: Activated Sludge,3m55s
Chapter Two: Heatwave, 5m25s
Chapter Three: One, Confident Flush, 4m30s
My Wits or Salts is a moving image work exploring porous entanglements between waste, body, and environment. Composed in multiple chapters, the series considers wastewater as an archive that holds traces of lives, illness, pharmaceuticals, hormones, and industrial residues. Reflecting on themes such as privatisation of water, failing public sanitation infrastructure in the UK and the technical processes used to manage and treat waste, the films bring attention to uneven distributions of harm and care and the interdependency of bodies of all kinds.
Fictional narratives, philosophical reflections and personal anecdotes collide with children’s games, aesthetically alluring polluted rivers and found footage of sewers. Recurring sonic and visual motifs – most notably deconstructed fragments of Dirty Work by Steely Dan and a softly spoken protagonist – weave the chapters into a resonant, nonlinear whole.
Rather than treating wastewater as a problem to be fixed or hidden, My Wits or Salts asks how we might relate to it differently – as something intimate, relational, and politically charged.
A commissioned text by Dr. Kirsten Cooke can be read here
A recording of an ‘in-conversation’ about the works, with Dr. Kirsten Cooke can be found here
*the title is taken from a line from the poem, Incontinence by Hahn, S. (1993) Chicago University Press
install shot: outside Focal Point Gallery on Big Screen Southend
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 2: Heatwave (still), 2025, 05:25 mins. Courtesy the artist.
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 2: Heatwave (still), 2025, 05:25 mins. Courtesy the artist.
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 3: One, Confident flush (still), 2025, 04:30mins. Courtesy the artist.
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 1: Activated Sludge (still), 2025, 03:55 mins. Courtesy the artist.
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 3: One, Confident flush (still), 2025, 04:30mins. Courtesy the artist.
Bryony Gillard, My Wits or Salts, Chapter 2: Heatwave (still), 2025, 05:25 mins. Courtesy the artist.