A Cup of Spilled Water is an installation that I built and ran during the degree show. It brings together several materials and processes, with writing forming part of the work. I conduct my research through autoethnographic and autotheoretical approaches, moving between working with materials, everyday experience and reading. The process of writing shapes how I understand what is happening and what I do next.
This reflection draws on three texts I wrote during my summer research. Exhibition Diary documents the process of working with materials, including setting up, running and observing the installation. Following Water from My Room into the City (hereafter Following Water) follows water in everyday life to trace the infrastructure of water supply and drainage, bringing together documents, bodily experience and events within the work. Between Digital Images and Material Encounters (hereafter Between Digital Images) begins with my feelings and actions when working with materials, exploring disgust, shame and responsibility.
In this reflection, Part 1 discusses how failure and shame operate in practice and writing, and how they gradually come to be recognised as working methods. Part 2 extends this discussion to water and elemental media, asking how I participate in these material relations through building and maintaining the work, and how boundaries within these relations are maintained.
Part 1 Developing a method through failure
As my practice developed, I did not initially recognise failure and shame as working methods. Yet when I revisited my autoethnographic writing, I could see that they had already been operating within my practice. Failures and accidents took the form of leaking pumps, insects, noise and plans that could not be carried out. As the person carrying out the work, I experienced shame when I had to confront these things that were not supposed to happen according to my original plan. It was a response to being forced to remain present and face myself.
At the beginning of the work, I did not have a clear idea of my methods. Although I had discussed the place of knowledge and practice in my Unit 2 document, this was more an exploration of possibilities and speculation. I see this pattern as a characteristic of my work, the methods were not fully determined in advance. They were already operating through making, while recording and looking back were also part of my practice. Failure and shame were therefore not simply documented; they continued to operate through the process of recording and revisiting, even though I had not yet named them. In Exhibition Diary, I document my process of working with materials. This text focuses more closely on how I work. A Cup of Spilled Water, as a whole, shows this method at work. I document the working process, revisit my feelings and develop possible arguments. Through this process, I engage with the arguments of others and explore how those emerging from my practice might relate to them.
In Posthuman Convergences, Matthew Fuller discusses the possibility of art becoming a metadiscipline by considering how disciplines shape their objects of study and modes of inquiry. He writes that art ‘is particularly open to encounter the problem of the stupid, the pathetic, the vile, the ignorant as they are sublated or effaced in other disciplines.’ I understand this to suggest that no discipline can fully account for what it studies. Art can engage with what other disciplines exclude or cannot address, including what is regarded as the stupid, the pathetic, the vile and the ignorant. What is sublated or effaced in other disciplines can thus become a starting point for artistic work. Fuller (2025) continues: ‘Failure to learn, to communicate, to disentangle trauma from daily life, shame, embarrassment, all of these can be working methods.’ From this perspective, I begin to consider how my practice can constitute research: how it develops through failure and shame, and how it connects with other knowledge in the field. I discuss this further in Part 2.
Failure has been part of my practice since Unit 2. I would imagine how the work might operate, only to find through experiments that the materials overturned my plans. I had to reconsider the properties of the materials themselves and make adjustments or compromises, becoming implicated in the process myself. In Exhibition Diary, I documented a change to the water tubing. My original plan was to split the tubing from one pump into two narrower tubes. During experiments in the studio, I used valves to adjust the flow through each branch, aiming to balance the water supplied and returned through both. However, this balance proved difficult to maintain over time, alongside problems with voltage and noise. I had to change my plan and give each tube its own water pump. This change also affected my plans for the sound of the rollers, and meant the iron sheet could no longer colour the water in both containers. In this sense, those plans failed. The interactions I had expected to observe did not occur for technical reasons, or rather, because of the materials themselves.
I could attribute this failure to insufficient technical skills and preparation for the exhibition, which prevented me from producing the phenomena I had planned to explore. Perhaps a better understanding of physics, plumbing or the tools for controlling water would have led to a different outcome. These technical limitations also meant that some of the interactions I had intended to investigate remained unexplored. Yet this explanation alone overlooks what I encountered through making and running the installation. It would turn the work towards illustrating my prior assumptions, with practice becoming something to be managed. From another perspective, my lack of knowledge, the technical failures and my inability to achieve what I intended made me realise how my actions and intentions overlapped with those of others who work with water and attempt to control it. While we were preparing the exhibition, workers asked us to stop pouring water into the sink because it was leaking through the external wall to the floor below. As I was still adjusting the water circuit in my work, the building’s drainage infrastructure, which I relied on, also encountered problems. How I handled water in the work was therefore affected by the condition of the building and the interventions of others. In the running installation, the shift to three separately controlled pumps led to changes in the voltage, pump frequency and the pulsations of the tubing. The work I observed and documented in Exhibition Diary, including what could be discovered and discussed through it, consequently differed from my original plan. Once water flowed steadily before me, water pressure, voltage, leaks and balance became invisible. This prompted the inquiry into water that I develop in Following Water.
My interest in writing about shame developed through reading Japanese I-novels and Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter (Ōe, 1970). Ōe showed me how exposing shame could be a method of writing. As a reader, I found myself caught between moral judgement and the dilemmas within the story, compelled to stay with what made me uncomfortable rather than turn away.
This is also what I do in Between Digital Images, where I describe how shame emerges in my practice. In Exhibition Diary and Between Digital Images, I recorded leaving the space with my toolbox once the water began to flow; hesitating over whether to photograph the insects’ bodies after removing them, as familiar criticisms and concerns crossed my mind; and throwing my work into a bin at the end of an exhibition. I read these moments through shame, an interpretation that emerged when I revisited those experiences. Shame led me to turn away from materials and retreat into the digital, yet my own feelings, which I could not avoid confronting, drew me back. With guilt and disgust, I reached into the water containing dead insects and dust to retrieve their bodies. To analyse this shame, I first have to acknowledge my disgust towards the insects’ bodies. I wanted to reject them. Confronting myself living alongside what disgusted me brought a sense of shame. Kristeva’s account of the abject in Powers of Horror (Kristeva, 1982) offers a way to understand this experience. The abject is what the subject must expel in order to constitute itself. Even after this expulsion, it never entirely disappears. Writing about these moments allows me to examine how shame shapes my decisions about what to remove from the work, what to record and what audiences would see.
The insects’ bodies could be removed, and the photographs need not be taken, but the shame these actions brought me continued to operate through recording and revisiting. Looking back at the process of removing the bodies and hesitating over whether to photograph them, I saw how the work had slipped away from my plans. I did not want to face my inability to control the work and tried to conceal my sense of inadequacy, only to be drawn back by the materials. Through maintaining the work, I also helped determine what could remain within it and what needed to be cleared away. While my attention was primarily on my own actions and responses to the materials, these encounters also made me aware of other lives within the environment I had arranged. The insects entered the work in ways I had not anticipated, and I did not know how they had encountered the water before they died. Removing the insects’ bodies did not end my relationship with their deaths. The act of cleaning became part of that relationship, and I still had to face the responsibility that came with my involvement.
From here, I began to ask how I participate in maintaining the boundaries of the work, and how these boundaries change through accidents and adjustments. Part 2 explores this question further by following the flow of water and the work of maintenance.
Part 2 What keeps water where it is
‘One tributary of the river flowed through the bedroom, leaving behind limescale in kettles and at the bottom of cups, from minerals picked up in the chalk aquifer.’ (Rain at the bedroom window)
The Following Water in my work follows the paths water takes in my daily life, from spills from a cup and drips from a pillow to water collected in bottles and leaks from pipes. These encounters inform how I bring materials from my bedroom into the work, rather than selecting them to create a predetermined scene. As I documented in Observation, I found that I could not treat water simply as a tool. Working with it required ongoing adjustments that affected both my actions and the other materials in the installation.
My research does not begin by entering a laboratory or an existing field site. Instead, the field takes shape through building and maintaining the work. As someone who cares for the materials, I attend to what happens within the work, observing and recording what I find through embodied experience and participating in the field through my labour. I approach the work as a field of happenings, with maintenance, or care, as my way of participating and forming relations with other materials. Other lives also encountered the environment I had arranged. Seeds soaked in water from the installation grew into grass more quickly than I had expected, while insects entered the water unexpectedly. Through these encounters, I began to consider how the work was also shaped by the activities of other living things, beyond my intentions and the actions of maintenance.
In Rheinwasseraufbereitungsanlage (Rhinewater Purification Plant, 1972), Hans Haacke researched local water purification facilities and built an installation in the museum that treated water from the Rhine (Haacke, 1972) . A display of water samples in the same exhibition also used test results from a municipal chemical testing institute. This work showed me how research into a particular body of water and its pollution could connect with infrastructure and institutions through an installation. While Haacke began with water treatment infrastructure, my inquiry began with water in the bedroom and its relations with everyday materials. In my own practice, building and maintaining the installation, together with the feelings and experiences arising through this work, shape how I come to know water. My investigation of Thames Water in Following Water extends this inquiry to how water is managed through infrastructure and institutions. Comparing the documents I consulted with my experience of maintaining the installation made me consider how changes in water were noticed, recorded and responded to in each setting, and what each approach might leave out.
In my exhibition, the flow and leakage of water within the installation brought uncertainty about safety. Meeting the exhibition’s requirements meant maintaining this shifting, tide-like boundary through my labour. In doing so, I became entangled with water, coming to know it through the movements of my hands and through the words of others. In my hands, water was handled as part of the work. For the exhibition staff, it was something to be managed and controlled. I moved between these positions. I could not simply push away the water I worked with and touched, nor could I ignore the uncertainty it presented to others. Through maintaining the work, I had to remain within this environment, participating in what happened and observing changes in both the work and its surroundings. This maintenance had not been part of my plan. More precisely, my experience of maintaining water arose from the failure of that plan. Refilling the water, adjusting the tubing and removing the insects’ bodies were also shaped by my expectations of the work, my feelings about failure and my shame. Through making, recording and revisiting, I examine how these feelings enter the actions of maintenance and help determine which changes are retained, which are removed. These decisions shape the form in which the work continues to operate.
Water is known in different ways. In water quality reports, it is recorded as numerical values; within water supply infrastructure, it is transported and treated; in my work, I come to know it through leaks, evaporation and my responses to these changes. In Following Water, I trace these relations through infrastructure, drawing on cultural and historical perspectives to understand how they have formed. Whether in a cup in my room, a treatment plant, wastewater or the sea, water encounters different materials and is known through different methods.
My research draws on media ecology and an elemental approach. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters approaches media studies through the elements (Peters, 2015). While traditional media theory understands media as carriers of human meaning and intention, Peters examines how media are constituted through and interact with elements such as the ocean, fire and the sky. His discussion of elemental media allows me to understand water and computational media as jointly constituting the conditions of everyday life. I bring this understanding into the building and running of my work, asking how the sealing, flow and balance of the water circuit are temporarily achieved through joining materials and continually adjusting them. As I wrote in my Following Water, ‘The sealing was an effect, held up for a time through these joints.’
At the beginning of Unit 3, I asked how a 3D scanned object could return to the physical world, what role and position it could take within a room, and how it might interact with other objects. In asking these questions, I separated digital media from other aspects of the room, such as water, drawing distinctions between reality and the virtual, nature and culture. Through working with water in A Cup of Spilled Water and participating in these relations, I found that water and media were entangled within my work. I could no longer distinguish water as nature from the digital as media. In Between Digital Images, I traced my entanglement with the digital back to scanning my bedroom in Unit 2, when my feelings and experiences seemed absent from the model, even as the folds remained on its surface.
Peters challenges strict divisions between nature and culture, and between subject and object, understanding media as combinations of the natural and the artificial. Drawing on this perspective, I shifted from asking how a digital object could return to the physical world to asking how water and computational images operate together within the same room. A projection fell on an iron sheet gradually rusting as water flowed over it. Viewers could not distinguish natural light from the projected image, and the computational image became part of the environment. As water changed the surface of the iron sheet, it also changed how the projected image appeared. The projection, in turn, changed how I perceived the water and the rusting surface. In my Unit 3 practice, I came to know water through embodied participation in the bedroom, intervening, maintaining and recording its encounters with other materials. I also began to recognise how I was shaped by this arrangement of everyday life.
In Hyperobjects (Morton, 2013) , Timothy Morton uses the concept of viscosity to discuss the impossibility of achieving a detached position in relation to hyperobjects. In his account, no object can maintain a clean, safe distance from hyperobjects, or fully isolate, exclude or send certain materials to a genuine away. Objects remain distinct from one another, but their effects, traces and material conditions adhere to other objects, making it impossible to maintain a neutral observer’s position or stable, clear boundaries between inside and outside. In Between Digital Images, I wrote about removing the insects’ bodies from the water. This action cleared traces of death from the water’s surface, allowing the work to continue in the state I wanted it to maintain. Yet removing their bodies did not create an away. More insects appeared in the water on the following days, while evaporation left white marks around the bottles. Their deaths also remained in my writing and in the decisions through which I continued to maintain the work.
Conclusion
Moving materials out of the bedroom and into my work does not detach them from the relations that sustain everyday life. I approach the bedroom as a site constituted through objects working with one another, with us among them. When I bring these objects into the field, their existing relations are stretched or displaced as they encounter other materials in new ways. My role also changes in this process. Responsibilities for maintenance that were previously distributed across everyday arrangements fall more directly on me within the work, making my participation in sustaining these conditions more apparent. This shift in relations gives rise to a new position for me through my work in the field. By rearranging objects and the ways they come into contact, I try to reimagine my relationship with water and explore other possibilities for participation and responsibility.
At the end of Following Water, I wrote, ‘The documents, the work and the body all set boundaries. But every boundary held only for a time, what held on was the stickiness itself, in labour, in straying, in answering.’ My practice develops through what I discover in failure. Bringing my own experiences of failure into Following Water, I examine how maintenance holds water’s shifting boundaries in place, how these practices relate to wider water infrastructures, and how stable water provision remains entangled with what escapes control. Revisiting these encounters through making, recording and reflecting has also led me to recognise the limits of my own experience in understanding these relations. I began to consider how my practice might engage with other ways of knowing water, extending this inquiry beyond my own position.
Bibliography
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Fuller, M. (2025) ‘Art as metadiscipline: Art/everything else’, in Klumbytė, G., Jones, E. and Braidotti, R. (eds.) Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399512688-013.
Haacke, H. (1972) Rheinwasseraufbereitungsanlage (Rhinewater Purification Plant) [Installation]. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Ōe, K. (1970) A Personal Matter. Translated by J. Nathan. New York: Grove Press.
Peters, J.D. (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thames Water (2026a) Annual Report 2025/26. Available at: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/media-library/2tad3w44/annual-report-2025-26.pdf (Accessed: July 2026).
Thames Water (2026b) Water Quality Report 2026: Camberwell, Water Supply Zone 0402. Available at: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/help/water-and-waste-help/water-quality/check-your-water-quality#/search (Accessed: July 2026).
Wallis, B. (ed.) (1986) Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Image
Jingwen Liang, A Cup of Spilled Water, Multimedia installation (2026)
Jingwen Liang, A Cup of Spilled Water, Multimedia installation(2026)
About the author
Jingwen (Erica) Liang is a London-based artist whose practice explores the materiality of computational processes. She graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, MA Fine Art in 2026. Instagram: ekua_azxnd