Soon after receiving an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999, she obtained her first major museum solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Hemicycle Gallery in Washington, D.C. A year later, she participated in the prestigious biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the early 2000s, for her first major gallery exhibitions at Ace Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, Donovan mounted a series of site-responsive installations, which became representative of her practice. In celebrated works, most notably Transplanted (2001), Nebulous (2002), and Haze (2003), Donovan created sublime gradients of light, color, translucence, and texture using nothing but tar paper, Scotch tape, and drinking straws, respectively. Despite the artificiality of their materials, Donovan’s works often take on biomorphic qualities or evoke natural phenomena, from fog and rock formations to fungal blooms and stalagmites. Other works such as Colony (2000), which suggested urban sprawl, gestured to humankind’s mark on the world—the Anthropocene.

'When we first filled the pipe, everything appeared to be satisfactory. Soon afterwards however, the weight of the water broke the back of the pipes, because the peat filled gullies allowed the pipe to sink down. This problem persisted intermittently for two years,' he adds.

Foster also explains that the water itself has caused problems. 'In this particular area we have very peaty water. The peat suspended in the water sticks to the inside of the pipeline, causing ripples on the pipe. This reduces the flow rate by 20%.'

To combat this problem, every six months Foster has to clean out the pipe.

'We drain the entire pipeline,' he says. 'We then put a bristled pig at the top and turn the valve on slightly at the top. The water pressure pushes the pig down, and when it comes out the bottom, usually after about five minutes, the pipe is clean.

'The dirty water from the pipe sits in a small pond near the bottom of the pipe, but it eventually settles out and goes back into the river,' he adds. 'There's nothing we can do about this problem really, we just have to keep cleaning it.'

Talking finance

Another aspect of the plant that Foster is keen to point out involves problems with the pricing structure for the electricity produced, which he now sells to Scottish and Southern Energy.

Land art is art that is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as rocks or twigs. Land art is usually documented in artworks using photographs and maps which the artist could exhibit in a gallery. Land artists also made land art in the gallery by bringing in material from the landscape and using it to create installations.

BRIDGIT is titled after the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has had multiple iterations across different geographical locations and points in history. BRIDGIT was shot entirely on Prodger’s iPhone, which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to time, social interaction and work. Body and device become extensions of each other, and the work becomes a unified meditation on shifting subjectivity.