we are water

we are water invites you to sit at the table/bridge to reflect on your relationship with water. What are the personal, political, historical and sacred relationships you hold with water? In the slow stillness of contemplation, what surfaces and integrates? 

Since 2014 I have been creating interactive installations that focus on cultivating an empathic relationship with water by inviting people to witness and/or participate in contemplative practice. 

I constructed this installation out of parts of previous sculptures, which I disassembled and reimagined here. It was an exercise in non-attachment to let go of existing work, allowing it to flow into its present form.

The test tubes which line the table/bridge hold water collected from creeks, rivers, lakes and an ocean for previous installations. They also hold the Colorado River, collected this summer as I traveled the path between California and Colorado. In the spirit of reciprocity with the river, I wanted to give back something as I gathered a small sample. What could I possibly give back? How could I show my love and gratitude? To be in relation is to wonder about these questions, and so I decided as a small gesture in the moment to read to the river a blessing by the poet John O’Donohue, “In Praise of Water.”* As you sit with the water, perhaps you too will imagine ways to share an act of love with the water within you and around you. 

Perhaps, too, you will cross this invisible bridge between the seen and unseen. The three openings in the table are crossed by a woven fabric of receipts bound with wire. They are the material of previous tapestry work, which explores the hidden nature of consumption. They reference the complexity of our habits as consumers, provoking questions around how we hold and behold our responsibility and interdependence on this planet.

Floating above the table, the illuminated canoe shape was created by hand-stitching my photographic negatives. It is part of an earlier work, Knowing Your Water.*   In juxtaposing the test tubes, signifying science and research,  with the photographic negatives, signifying the emotional intimacy of memories, I bring together the ways in which we study our interconnectedness. Both symbolize a way of holding time for examination, a chance to consider and change course before being carried toward our destination.

Reading to water

Reading to Boulder Creek, Boulder, Colorado 2022

Collecting water along the Colorado River, Blythe, CA

In praise of water
​John O’Donohue
​
Let us bless the grace of water:
The imagination of the primeval ocean
Where the first forms of life stirred
And emerged to dress the vacant earth
With warm quilts of color.
The well whose liquid root worked
Through the long night of clay,
Trusting ahead of itself openings
That would yet yield to its yearning
Until at last it arises in the desire of light
To discover the pure quiver of itself
Flowing crystal clear and free
Through delighted emptiness.

The courage of a river to continue belief
In the slow fall of ground,
Always falling farther
Toward the unseen ocean.
The river does what words would love,
Keeping its appearance
By insisting on disappearance;
Its only life surrendered
To the event of pilgrimage,
Carrying the origin to the end,
Seldom pushing or straining,
Keeping itself to itself
Everywhere all along its flow,
All at one with its sinuous mind,
An utter rhythm, never awkward,
It continues to swirl
Through all unlikeness,
With elegance:
A ceaseless traverse of presence
Soothing on each side
The stilled fields,
Sounding out its journey,
Raising up a buried music
Where the silence of time
Becomes almost audible.

Tides stirred by the eros of the moon
Draw from that permanent restlessness
Perfect waves that languidly rise
And pleat in gradual forms of aquamarine
To offer every last tear of delight
At the altar of stillness inland.
And the rain in the night, driven
By the loneliness of the wind
To perforate the darkness,
As though some air pocket might open
To release the perfume of the lost day
And salvage some memory
From its forsaken turbulence
And drop its weight of longing
Into the earth, and anchor.

Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it,
The buoyancy of water
Stronger than the deadening,
Downward drag of gravity,
The innocence of water,
Flowing forth, without thought
Of what awaits it,
The refreshment of water,
Dissolving the crystals of thirst.

Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.
Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.
Blessed be water,
Our first mother.

From To Bless the Space Between Us