APRIL 2024 · WATERLINE
Perpetual white noise
Cambrian Mountains, Powys
The Victorian dams in Elan Valley were built to supply Birmingham with water, a project completed in 1904 after flooding six farms and a village. What they did to the landscape is irreversible and total: the Elan and Claerwen rivers replaced by a chain of long reservoirs, the original valley floor now twenty metres down in the water. What they left above the waterline is architecture as engineering — stone spillways, release gates, overflow channels designed to shape enormous volumes of falling water into something controllable.
The spillways are the thing. Concrete steps descend at a fixed angle, the water spreading into a thin sheet across each step before dropping to the next. Long exposure turns this from movement into form — the descent becomes a series of white planes, the geometry of each step readable through the water's surface. The pattern of it is the same at every scale, from the full dam face to a single channel section. That self-similarity is not accidental. It's what makes the fall controllable.
Long exposure turns this from movement into form — the descent becomes a series of white planes, the geometry of each step readable through the water's surface.
Elan Valley — April 2024
At the release gates the symmetry is precise: two openings side by side, the water falling in matching curtains, the receding perspective of the channel pulling the eye back to where the reservoir surface begins. Everything ordered. Nothing left to chance. A long exposure at the overflow shows the water as continuous white line rather than moving water — pure form, pure descent.
The sound is constant and the same on all sides. White noise in the literal sense — every frequency present, none dominant. It fills the valley and you stop registering it after a few minutes, which may be the point.
Concrete dam spillway steps descending with flowing water, geometric lines and shadows
Close-up of dam spillway texture and water flow patterns creating abstract lines
Long exposure of water flowing down steep dam wall meeting calm reservoir below
Symmetrical dam structure with release gates and long exposure water flow, receding perspective
Overhead view of reservoir release channels with water streaming between concrete walls