Sky Rivers

Having spent the past 12-months at The Creator Incubator as the 2025 HIC Services Artist Residency Award (HIC_ARA) recipient, Sandy Sanderson, culminates in her residency with Sky Rivers. 

Sky Rivers explores air as a living, relational force, something that moves between bodies, forests, and weather, and is never fully known. 

Approached through an animist lens, air is encountered not as empty space, but as a presence: a companion, a carrier, a friend.  

The installation takes form as soft sculptural elements and sound, creating space to slow down, rest, and breathe. A mound of fabric leaves gathers on the floor, marked with enlarged forms of stomata, the microscopic pores through which trees release moisture into the air. Above, long chiffon ribbons descend from the ceiling, tracing the vertical movement of breath, vapour, and weather.  

Printed fabric banners bearing cryptic, elemental symbols hang in the space like devotional forms. Drawing on Renaissance and cathedral visual traditions, the work uses fabric, symbolism, and scale to gesture toward the atmosphere itself as a cathedral. 

Sky Rivers is informed by the biotic pump theory, which describes how forests actively generate wind and rain through collective breathing and release. 

Through symbol, fabric, and atmosphere, the installation gestures toward the vast system of air that surrounds and sustains us. It offers space to pause and breathe within that system.