This action was performed in the ancient Gihon Spring in Jerusalem, and formed part of the research undertaken in the Drawing on Thresholds residency in 2011. The Spring is the source upon which human settlements were built, dating from at least 4500 BCE. The following is an extract from my notebook written after the performance:

“How can the imagination begin to imagine its beginnings? The mind in search of its source, a cultural flow within an elemental flow. A body makes it way barefoot through the ever narrowing breach in a mountain produced by the movement of an ancient spring. I am thinking about the flow of this spring  since time immemoriam, thinking about the eons of civilisational process that saw this land settled, the shaping of life that the source has helped foster. I compress the vastness of the thoughts into the rhythm of my body breathing, seeking to hold these impressions and reconcile them with the deep time of the mountain formation, the cleft that the source has made. The seemingly static rock becomes increasingly live, like the gushing water carrying my footsteps. In this intense but compressed liveness, the mind descends into the source of the spring, the language the body is conjuring is carried away into the cold, rushing water, through the contact of my soles on the rock. In the dark, my imagination and the mountain, the water and my body, pass through one another.”