Alegria Repila Smith exposes the canal underworld with Surface Tension
- Upnorf
- Jan 24
- 2 min read
For much of its recent history, the Leeds–Liverpool Canal has existed as a kind of civic afterthought: a dark, slow-moving presence cutting through the city. Once crowded with boats carrying wool, coal and cloth from Yorkshire to Liverpool, the canal appears almost stalled in time, and is now mostly subject to clean-up initiatives, renowned for the litter and matter that sinks below the water's surface.
Artist and Sculptor Alegria Repila Smith’s installation Surface Tension, asks us to look again at this neglected canal and, more importantly, to listen. This installation is on view at Leeds Art Gallery 24-25 January, a short but mighty stint for an immersive sculpted experience that sits impressively in its space.
Smith’s starting point is the idea that water remembers. Over decades, the canal has accumulated not just physical debris but the residue of human lives: work, movement, intimacy and loss. Beneath its surface lies a submerged archive of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, clogged with objects that once served a function but now exist in a state of watery rot. Smith has spent months dredging the canal, retrieving artifacts that have been softened, bloated, mottled and transformed by long submersion. In Surface Tension, these objects re-emerge not as historical evidence but as, in Smith's words, ghosts.
The installation brings together sculpture and sound to animate these drowned materials. Arranged within the Leeds Art Gallery, the artifacts retain the marks of their time underwater. They feel neither fully alive nor fully dead. Instead, they occupy an unsettled space between past and present. The water that once sealed them away becomes, conceptually, a thin and permeable veil. A veil that Smith deliberately disturbs.
Sound plays a crucial role in this act of disturbance. The installation does not simply display objects; it gives them a voice. Through layered audio elements, Smith constructs an environment in which these canal relics seem to murmur and move.
By diving beneath the surface (both physically and metaphorically) and returning with these altered objects, Smith mediates between worlds: land and water, now and then, the living city and its submerged histories. This act of translation acknowledges the difficulty of truly recovering the past. What resurfaces is always, every time, damaged and changed.
Surface Tension resonates strongly with Leeds, a city still shaped by industrialisation. The canal stands as a reminder of that history, but Smith’s installation reframes it as something more intimate and unsettling. The work suggests that the infrastructure of industry is not inert; it continues to hold and transmit memory. In doing so, it asks uncomfortable questions about what we choose to preserve and what we allow to decay.
Smith’s attention to water as a living archive feels particularly timely. The canal’s ghosts are not content to remain submerged. They press upward, demanding recognition. Surface Tension does not offer closure or resolution, but it does offer a chance to pause, lean in and listen to what has been flowing beneath the city all along.
This presentation forms part of the Accelerator Bursary 2025, funded by Leeds Art Fund and delivered in partnership by Leeds Art Gallery and Assembly House.