Outfall, 2026

HD video, 20 min

Commissioned by East Quay

Outfall confronts the hidden processes engineered to make our waste disappear and asks, how do we sense what society tries to keep hidden, and how does this impact our daily lives and environment?

As sewage discharges, polluted waterways and the systemic failures of UK water companies face growing public scrutiny, Outfall turns our attention to the very infrastructure through which waste is carried, treated, and released. Wastewater holds traces of our bodies, medicines, industrial chemicals, hormones, and everyday habits. Probing the relationship between wastewater, our bodies and the environment, the exhibition considers how smell, sound, and touch might become tools for navigating the unseen systems that shape everyday life.

Filmed across the South West – including Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset – Gillard gathers encounters with people and animals connected to wastewater. A sick woman describes an unfamiliar smell to a fish; a plumber rips out a bathroom suite, exposing an intimate proximity to bodily fluids and the things we flush away; plastic bottles drift in the ocean; and detection dogs trace contamination in water systems. Threading together bodily experience, environmental pollution, and systems of detection, Gillard asks how we can sense the unseen. Improvised recordings by musicians inside a water treatment centre form the film’s score, encouraging audiences to experience wastewater through listening as much as looking.

Displayed alongside the film are over 70 ceramic bottles — replicas of single-use plastic produced by three of the world’s largest plastic bottle polluters — Coca-Cola, Danone, and Nestlé. Glazed using river mud collected from high-contamination sites along the River Avon and cast without lids, the open bottles connect plastic pollution directly to contaminated waterways, and the commercial systems that extract, consume, and discard water. Rather than treating wastewater merely as something to hide or clean away, Outfall asks us to consider it as a shared material that connects us all. By noticing what is usually overlooked, the exhibition invites us to reflect on collective infrastructure, ecological vulnerability, and environmental futures.

Film credits

Written and directed by Bryony Gillard

Performance to camera: Mary Woodvine

Plumber: Lewin Greaves

Leak detection dogs: Bluey, Bandit, and Davey

Voiceover: Maria Christoforidou

Musical improvisation: Tina Hitchens, Jo Kelly, Sarahsson

Editor: Bryony Gillard Camera operator: Oliver Sutherland

Sound recording, mix, and post-production: Oliver Sutherland

Audio description: Charlotte Whitten

With special thanks to Oliver Sutherland, Anya Lewin, Mandy Bloomfield, Rachel Gipetti, Georgie Gillard, Gabrielle Tymków, Gwen Burlington, Ben Borthwick, Kirsty Hendry, Sue Goodland, Nikki Glover, Lewis Worley, Luke Jones, Macarena Gomez-Barris, East Quay, Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, Peer Group, and University of Gloucestershire.

Bryony Gillard, Outfall, 2026, HD Video, 25min, video still. Pictured: Mary Woodvine