BACK
Post-Purification Garden, 2026
Transparent basin, live reeds, aquatic plants, soil, water, iron plaque, clay, PVC, LEDs, TDS sensors, Arduino.
An interactive wetland installation where hybrid reeds respond to changing water conditions, visualising purification as accumulation rather than disappearance.
What is remained after purification? If one place becomes clean, does another body have to hold the pollution? If water is purified, where does the pollution go?
Post-Purification Garden is an installation that reimagines a wetland as a living archive of contamination. Inspired by the reed ecosystems of the Biesbosch, the work combines live aquatic plants, fabricated hybrid reeds, water, soil, iron plaque, and electronic sensors inside a shallow transparent basin.
The project focuses on Phragmites australis, a reed species often found in wetlands and water purification environments. Around the roots of reeds, iron plaque can form as a mineral layer that binds and stores pollutants such as heavy metals. In this installation, that process is translated into a speculative garden where purification is not shown as a clean or invisible outcome, but as an accumulation of material traces.
Three hybrid reeds are connected to TDS sensors and Arduino-controlled LEDs. When the water condition changes, the reeds respond through light, turning the hidden chemical condition of the water into a visible signal. The garden becomes both an ecological model and an interactive system, asking what happens after purification, and where the remaining matter goes, while Phragmites Australis becomes both a plant and an archive, a body that remembers what the water has carried.
A Cycle of Post-Purification Map, 2026
Diagram mapping the speculative cycle of reed purification, from polluted water and iron plaque formation to harvesting and reprocessing as post-purification material.
A Cycle of Post-Purification is a speculative map that traces the life cycle of reed-based purification beyond the moment of filtration. Instead of understanding purification as a process of disappearance, the map follows how pollutants are received, absorbed, accumulated, harvested, and reprocessed through the body of the reed.
The drawing connects the wetland ecology of the Biesbosch with a designed system of post-purification material. It visualises the reed not only as a plant that cleans water, but as a living infrastructure that stores traces of contamination in its roots, soil, and surrounding iron plaque. Through this cycle, the act of purification becomes a process of holding, archiving, and transforming polluted matter into future material possibilities.
The Post-Purification Booklet documents the research, material experiments, and ecological thinking behind the project. It brings together field observations from the Biesbosch, microscopic images of reed structures, studies of iron plaque formation, and experimental processes using soil, water, iron sulfate, and baking soda.
Rather than functioning only as documentation, the booklet acts as a small archive of the project’s material logic. It records how the reed root can be read as a container, how iron plaque becomes a trace of purification, and how polluted matter might be understood as a material with memory. Through images, diagrams, captions, and process notes, the booklet expands the installation into a research object that can be read, handled, and revisited.
Click a reed for full PDF
The Body that holds, 2026
I stand, I live, between things.
Between water that pulls,
and soil that resists.
Between air that lightens me,
and mud that thickens my weight.
I do not belong to any of them.
I do not clean, I hold.
I stretch upward to breath,
and downward to remember.
In the shifting delta
where the river and sea negotiate their boundaries,
I’ve stood in between air, water, and soil,
where land is never entirely land
and water is never entirely water.
What arrives with the tide
does not disappear when it reaches me.
It slows, settles, and attaches.
It brings what has traveled so far.
Particles that no longer know their origin,
metals dissolved into transparency,
fragments of plastics carried invisibly.
And quietly,
they touch me,
brushing my skin,
moving inward my body.
Through the hollow channels of my stem,
I send breath downward.
Around my body in the ground,
then my breath meets iron. Iron thickens.
A reddish layer grows quietly
against my surface.
Nothing is removed, nothing vanishes.
Things accumulate in my body.
Heavy metals become my second skin.
PFAs settle into the thin space
where my root and soil negotiate their touch.
Microbes gather,
weaving themselves into the boundary of my body.
And together,
all those movements become my memory.
My body do not erase their presence, but storage.
My body does not forget
what passes through it.
It records through adhesion,
and this accumulation becomes structure.
I am one that archives,
not in order to cleanse,
but to hold.
-Poem by June Park
Research / Experiments
Design by June Park
Installation Assistant Yujin Kim
Gustoweg 83, Rotterdam
Master Interior Architecture:Research+Design, Pietzwart Institute