From a receptacle of tears to bath water and a melted snowman, Amy Sharrocks' Museum of Water in London tells the tale of how we interact with water in our daily lives.

There are more than 770 bottles in the collection, donated by hundreds of members of the public who responded to the London artist's invitation to send her a vessel of water and its significance.

Now she is asking Western Australians to help her create a WA edition of the award-winning exhibition.

"I want people to consider for themselves exactly what they like best about water," she said.

"What is it about it that you treasure most? Whether it's the water from the kitchen tap or water from the bedside table after a night full of dreams.

"Choose your water, find something to put it in and tell me why you brought it."

Amy Sharrocks with the Evaporation of Grief exhibit from the London Museum of Water. ( ABC Great Southern: Lisa Morrison )

Ms Sharrocks is the current Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) artist-in-residence.

She will present her latest Museum of Water at next year's PIAF Great Southern in Albany, before it becomes part of the Western Australian Museum's permanent collection.

At this point, Ms Sharrocks has no idea what type of water, bottles and stories will fill her WA edition of the Museum of Water.

"This museum is a very different kind of museum. It rests entirely on you to bring me things," she said.

"It makes you the donor, it makes you the artist and the curator of every artefact in the museum.

"If people don't come, I haven't got anything to show."

With WA being such a vast, dry state, Ms Sharrocks expects her latest Museum of Water to be radically different to the London and Netherlands exhibitions.

"There is a sense of life and death with water here," she said.

"A danger and precariousness in the experience of water that has not been present in the other spaces I have been."

Tears, creek water, dirty suds

There are more than 770 bottles in the London Museum of Water exhibition. ( Supplied: Amy Sharrocks )

More than 350 people responded to the artist's invitation to send her water to be included in her Museum of Water at London's Somerset House.

A man gave her tears of joy after hearing he had been accepted to be ordained as a priest.

A recycled shampoo bottle contains water from a huge wave in the Pacific Ocean.

One bottle contains water from 129,000 years ago, before the last ice age, taken from an ice core 649m below the surface.

"That was given to me by the British Antarctic Survey," Ms Sharrocks said.

A bottle labelled the Evaporation of Grief is empty, but brims with meaning.

When a woman's partner died in 2009, she filled the bottle with water from a river they used to walk along together.

"She put it on her mantelpiece and over … five years, she had noticed the water levels slowly going down," Ms Sharrocks said.

"She allied this to the changing process of her grief.

"It … had changed from the agony and desperate pain of the early days to an ongoing and abiding sadness."

A wave from the Pacific Ocean, captured in an empty shampoo bottle, is part of the UK Museum of Water. ( ABC Great Southern: Lisa Morrison )

One woman gave her a watercolour case with the water bottle she used for painting during 30 years of travelling in Asia and Africa.

"You can see the dipping of her paintbrush in this as she has used it to travel around Botswana and Mongolia and all these incredible far flung places," Ms Sharrocks said.

There is also a bottle of toothpaste spit and three bottles of urine.

"The second pee … was given to me by a young woman. She had just come from the gym, she was very fit," Ms Sharrocks said.

"She only had one kidney, and to pee for her was a triumph, a celebration, each time. That actually she almost didn't make it and she almost couldn't pee and that would have been the end of her.

"So her bottle is a medal, her bottle stands in triumph for a life she gets to live."

A fascination with water

The bottles tell of the "ritual of water, of births, baptisms, weddings and birthdays". ( Supplied: Banff )

The Museum of Water is the latest in string of water-themed works by Ms Sharrocks.

The Londoner is well known for her piece called Swim, where on July 12, 2007 she invited 50 people to swim across London from Tooting Bec Lido to Hampstead Heath Ponds.

In 2011 she completed London is a River City, a series of public walks tracing seven of London's buried rivers.

"I knew how I felt about water after all these works and I just wondered how other people felt … so I wanted to ask them," she said.