we are water

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

we are water is constructed out of previous sculptures, disassembled and reimagined here. This act is an exercise in non-attachment, letting go of existing work, allowing it to flow into its present form.

The test tubes which line the bridge/table hold water collected from creeks, rivers, lakes and oceans from previous installations. They also hold the Colorado River, collected over a summer as I traveled its path between California and Colorado. In the spirit of reciprocity with the river, I asked myself, “What could I possibly give back as I collected these small samples?  How could I show my love and gratitude?”  As a small gesture, I began reading to the river a blessing by the poet John O’Donohue, “In Praise of Water.”* I hope participants sitting here will also become curious about ways of sharing an act of love with the water within and around them. 

Further contemplating ways of communing and communicating with the seen and unseen, I wanted to pull attention to the crossing of a bridge. This took on the construction of the bridge/table between the two chairs. The three openings in the sculpture 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 inquiry around how we hold and behold our responsibility and interdependence on this planet. 

The illuminated canoe shape floating above was created by hand-stitching my photographic negatives, part of an earlier work, Knowing Your Water. Juxtaposing the test tubes–signifying science and research–with the photographic negatives–signifying the emotional intimacy of memories–emphasizes the ways in which we study our interconnectedness. 
 
Ultimately, we are water invites viewers to sit at the bridge/table to reflect on their relationship with water and to consider: What are the personal, political, historical and sacred relationships held with water? In the slow stillness of contemplation, what surfaces and integrates?

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