What am I looking at? A moonscape, detailed with cracks and crevices. A map of mud flats. The river seen from Sacred Buffalo mountain this morning, from high, high above. A Rorshach test in black and white, psychologically revealing.

No. A palladium print made from a xeroxed image of homemade bread. Yes, bread. How a loaf holds a global geography, gestures towards lunar landscapes.

The visual artist and poet Alison Knowles died last week in New York aged 92. I’m sitting in the Paul D. Fleck library at the Banff Centre poring over an artists’ book which contains one of her most compelling projects ‘Bread and Water’ (1995).

The premise is delightfully simple. It is also inexhaustibly profound.

Knowles was making homemade bread for her friends. When she’d baked the bread and let it cool, she noticed that the cracks and patterns on the bottoms of the loaves resembled rivers. Grey ghosts. Hollows, pools of collected light.

Knowles was a believer in the tangible effects of metaphor. She went one step further. She looked in atlases and began to match each pattern to a real river somewhere in the world. The Hudson at Jersey City. Mud Flats where the Nile meets the Nibia. Lake Como at Bellagio.

The prints in the slender book Knowles produced combine a bread / river image with text fragments taken from volumes containing information about the ecology and geography of the river areas. The words from the text books were chosen by placing a template of the river-pattern over pages of the source material and selecting words and phrases that the drawing’s lines passed through.

Water lily white to blue and crimson

Occasional the whale-headed stork

at night the scene is fireflies

I stare at the image of The Amazon at Belém until it begins to look like a thumbprint, until I feel I am drawn into the very centre of it. River hypnosis. Enchantment by bread. Perhaps it is something about the circularity, the resemblance to an iris – look into my eyes…. It seems impossible to glance away.

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Alison Knowles was a member of the ‘Fluxus’ movement in the ‘60s: an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets who, were inspired by John Cage to create experimental performances which emphasised chance-based process over the finished product, every enactment potentially distinct.

Many of her sculptures, performances, and musical works were so simple that anyone could (re)produce them (which was exactly the point). They often used ‘everyday’ materials like dried beans, shells, netting or even tunafish. Her most famous work, ‘Make a Salad’ (1962) is based on an ‘event score’, or a text-based directive that can be enacted by its reader. That score, in this case, consists only of the title, with no instructions on which ingredients to use and which steps to take.In 2022 she told the New York Times:

“I don’t want people looking passively at my work but actively participating by touching, eating, following an instruction about listening, physically making or taking something, or joining in an activity.”

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The remarkable thing about the palladium prints represented in ‘Bread and Water’ is that they seem to reproduce themselves long after you think you’ve finished looking at them. I can see Knowles’ ‘Belfast At The Irish Sea’ with my eyes shut.

Palladium printing is almost a forgotten technique now. Palladium is a rare white metal whose salts are photosensitive. When Alison was making this remarkable book, her process was involved - the salts had to be mixed with water, painted onto sheets of paper, dried in the dark, then exposed to films made from the xeroxes of the bread. After exposure, the sheets were placed in trays of water and the inages of the bottoms of the loaves of bread would swim back into view. A strange, long magic.

It is amazing to notice such a correspondence. To have seen the rivers in the first place. To bring them forth, painstakingly, generously. Can we replicate that generosity in how we treat ‘real’ rivers, real sustenance?