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In “Watterfall” parts of a passage from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt are made a structural template for experiencing Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic house Fallingwater through a sequence of corresponding photographs.

The passage describes a man in his bedroom moving back and forth between bed, window, door, and fire. Beckett is less interested in narrative and more interested in the failure of reason and language. He writes an exhaustive list of combinations of movement between these four areas of the room. It begins like this:

"Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; … "

And the passage continues for another thirty-one lines. The main bedroom at Fallingwater, known as Liliane’s bedroom, also contains these four areas. I have photographed this bedroom as though a character in Beckett’s imagination.

Both Wright and Beckett were masters of crafting the familiar as unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar as familiar. Concentrated into contiguous photographs Beckett's permutational language becomes a time-lapse of the infra-ordinary within Wright's extraordinary creation. To "imagine" moving in this way through a room, as Beckett arranged it on the page, presents a vision of disturbed domesticity. All rooms are witness to endless repetitions which language and photograph concentrate into unexpected patterns.

Fallingwater is set amongst forest whose seasonality establishes an organic motion set against the stasis of architecture. While photographing the bedroom in decelerated time I photograph the exterior seasonal landscape which seems to change in accelerated time. Moving from within a designed space to the outside evolved space, while each iterates forward through time, there seems to emerge a life cycle within a life cycle; the fast repetitions of domestic life and the slow repetitions of seasonal light. The stone building becomes consciously tethered to the orbit of the earth.

From 2007-2010 I worked for the architectural photography studio Hedrich Blessing as an apprentice and their first female photographer to work with clients on location. In 1937 Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned Hedrich Blessing to photograph the newly completed house at Bear Run (yet to be known as Fallingwater). Bill Hedrich made several photographs of the interior and exterior, the most famous of which is his view looking up at the staggered cantilevers projecting dramatically over the falls.

In 2024, as the house nears its 90th anniversary, I began an artist residency at Fallingwater asking how I might approach these two monuments: one of architecture, the other of photography. I found one answer in Watt, a piece of writing Beckett claimed to have helped keep him sane through the Second World War.

Though it is one of his more technical novels, Watt was a pivotal work for Beckett marking a radical shift in his relationship with language. Just as Fallingwater was a pivotal work for Wright marking a renaissance career comeback. They are each experiments in the architecture of form and both explore ideas of repetition, assembly, and assimilation.

This project will result in a book and an immersive installation. With support from, and in collaboration with, Fallingwater Institute and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

BOOK
~150 pages
14x11 inches
210 color photographs
VIEW FULL PDF Watterfall Kate Joyce in progress HERE

INSTALLATION
Grid 9 x 17 feet (dimensions variable) 140 photographs, 10x15 each, framed
8-12 color photographs of exterior landscape, 20x30, framed
Audio in exhibition space (numerous individual voices reading Watt passage)