the sum

Water flows throughout the entirety of my work. It is mapping, memory, and body; form, content, and a state of mind. In The Water Book, environmental journalist Alok Jha quotes Leonardo da Vinci:

Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometimes health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savour, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.

My art is inherently temporary, existing in emergent spaces vulnerable to serendipity. Impermanence is a crucial part of my practice. I want to create a place of offering, a place of mediation, a place of action. To invoke memory. A visual configuration of space and time. 

Location holds history in a way parallel to, and just as complicated as, the way humans hold memory. The installations of my work are sites of “incessant cutting and stitching, breaking and healing” (Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell), of self-sabotage and self-discovery. Sites of loss. Of many losses. Loss of family, of home, of partnerships, of understanding what I want from art. There are a lot of components, thoughts, ideas. All assembled together, expanding, spilling. Defining a space where Venus and Shadow exist within and without. 

Etchings, wall paint, handmade paper. Their behavior is intrinsic to them. I cannot impose my will on these materials. Listening, learning from, negotiating my ideas with what is happening inside the pieces. As a printmaker, this makes sense: you must let go and react to the work as you are making it. 

Here. Is a site where water has lived. Where water gushed out from the ceiling. Where water was touched, then washed away. Sopped up. Evaporated. My work doesn’t display a lack of water, but an absence of it. Water’s marks remain visible. In the removal of water, its essence is revealed. Water is impermanent but ongoing. Uncontrollable but responsive. Here. We witness the imprint, the traces of water. 

We see movement throughout the elements; the line quality of the drawing on the wall, the gestures in the films, the shapes and textures of the paper and prints… impulses, connective tissue, DNA; one aspect gets picked up in another detail that gets picked up in another material. 

Papermaking is dependent on water, on time, on the physicality of the artist. Water seeps into shreds of paper or plant matter. Softening the fibers. I pull sheets of soggy pulp, and the harder I press the pulp together, the stronger the bonds become. These handmade paper sculptures exist as fossils of water. We see similar requirements in printmaking, too. Water dissolves a corrosive salt. Deteriorating the surface of copper. The longer the plate bathes, the more metal is eaten away. Deeper grooves mean darker shapes, textures, lines. I ink, wipe, and print the image within the copper, which requires full body involvement. 

Printmaking and papermaking are repetitive, tedious processes. Drawing patterns on the walls has a similar disposition. I get into a rhythm that is physical and slow. I think about the repetition, the continuation of streams, waves, rain. Fresh, moving, alive, but simultaneously maintaining composure. There is an inherent struggle in containing water, similar to the process of making this body of work. The process keeps with the subject matter itself. How it’s made has a resistance to structure. Many people talk about how water has no structure. That it requires a vessel. And yet…I’m not convinced water wants to be held. It merely permits organisms to momentarily adjust its direction, until it once again forges, regulates, defines its transitory shapes.

I see my practice as a negotiation between me and water to bring internal structures outward. My hand and Water’s hand were both here. We react to each other’s marks. We respond to each other’s wills. We remember each other’s lives. 

Ultimately, I wanted a place to reconcile… to soften. Embedded within is the potential for renewal, for shifting, for iterating. “In time and with water, everything changes.” (The Water Book, Alok Jha). All components will ultimately dissolve into other forms.