There Is No Away: Confession, Water, and Collective Memory

You encounter the work before you fully understand it. From a distance, the tapestry reads as a horizon, its bands of color stretching across the walls with quiet insistence. As you move closer, its scale becomes bodily. It wraps the space not as decoration but as presence. At its center sits a wooden structure, Eddy Firmin’s Confessional Lawnmower. People pause, hesitate, enter. The installation does not announce itself as sacred or theatrical. It waits.

Mia Nielsen’s curatorial framework positions confession not as a purely spiritual or psychological act, but as a material and ecological condition that unfolds across bodies, geographies, and time. Firmin’s Confessional Lawnmower merges the ritual of confession with labor and repetition, transforming a traditionally private site of moral reckoning into a mechanized and exposed apparatus. The familiar architecture of the confessional is stripped of intimacy and instead foregrounds structure, suggesting how systems, whether religious, social, or colonial, regulate both guilt and absolution.

Nielsen intensifies this reading by enveloping the confessional within Gail Barone’s monumental textile Fresh Spike (2024). Stretching over ten meters across the surrounding walls, the tapestry functions less as backdrop than as a permeable membrane. Its horizontal bands evoke sedimentation, landscapes, and scarred horizons, surfaces shaped by time rather than resolution. Composed of ten distinct materials, each dyed using water drawn from rivers across the world, the work carries a material index of global circulation. Lake Ontario, the Ottawa River, the Atlantic off Portugal, and South American waterways including the Paraná River and Paraná Delta are not referenced symbolically but physically. The waters themselves stain the fabric, embedding it with traces of place, history, and movement.

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To stand within the installation is to feel held. The confessional does not dominate the space. It is absorbed by the textile’s reach. Nielsen’s spatial choreography collapses the boundary between interior admission and exterior world, reframing confession as a collective condition rather than an individual act. What is whispered inside does not vanish. It lingers. As philosopher Timothy Morton reminds us, “There is no away.”

The curatorial gesture insists on proximity. Viewers do not observe from a distance but occupy the same field as the materials and the structure. Entering the confessional becomes inseparable from standing within the tapestry’s embrace. In this way, the installation resists catharsis. It offers no purification, only continuity, an acknowledgment that responsibility, like water, does not end at the self.

As the rivers invoked in Barone’s tapestry silently surround the space, they act as witnesses, binding human vulnerability to ecological time. Édouard Glissant’s assertion that “we are not merely from a place; we are from a relation” resonates deeply here. Nielsen’s curation makes this relation visible and felt. When you step away from the work, nothing feels resolved. The confession has already traveled, into fabric, into water, into shared space. You leave knowing that what was carried inside the structure continues to move long after you do.