Inverno:

Gestures for Rising Waters

Tom Pearson, 2026

Mixed media: Polaroid prints, printed cards, custom cardboard boxes, found artifacts, ecofacts, site-specific performance activations.

In this multimedia series of prompts, Tom Pearson explores the intersection of environmental vulnerability and the fluidity of human memory. By framing "appetite" as a hydraulic force, Pearson maps the flooding of physical landscapes onto the dissolution of the self.

The work functions as an aqueous archive. Here, memory is not a fixed monument but a tidal process—subject to the same currents of depletion and overflow as our natural ecosystems.

Through a series of instructions and activations, participants are invited to view themselves as porous sites, reshaped by the constant flux of the natural, built, and imaginative worlds. When participants engage with these prompts, agency is passed from the artist to the “audience” as the work manifests in both the conceptual and materiality of their co-creation.

Inverno: Gestures for Rising Waters is a work-in-process where the process itself is the work. Taking inspiration from Fluxus scores and prompts, and blending them with his own sense of immersive scenario-building, Tom Pearson is crafting a series of invitations and reveals that will welcome participants into acts of co-creation around themes of memory, environment, and activism. Focused on climate related issues, winter dormancy, and tidal patterns of the Veneto, the work situates itself in Venice during the Acqua alta (high water) and Carnevale seasons, where Tom will be an artist-in-residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in February and March, 2026.