For Through our Eyes! I offer a sculpture from WATER Shadows as a ‘gathering vessel’, a physical container to receive hand-drawn personal ‘celebrations’ of water from residents of the Grimsby community. These may include dreams, ideas, nominations of special watery places, poems, drawings, paintings and stories. Wav files of local water recordings will also be accepted online. WATER Shadows : Grimsby is an invitation to draw water, make waves, engage in the creative flow, make a water doodle, be inspired by special watery places and celebrate water in creative ways! When you have made your creative ‘water offering’ you can then roll it up gently and release it into the ‘water temple’. All contributions with be gathered and put on display as an integral part of the exhibit. Each work will be hung on the wall behind the ‘water temple’ and will also be exhibited online in the Web Water Portal dedicated to WATER Shadows : Grimsby.
WATER Shadows is a body of work, an installation of sound sculptures that features field recordings of watery places of significance, to me and my South Georgian Bay community. I welded sculptures out of steel then wove, sewed and wrapped them out of strips of old bicycle inner tubes, collected locally. As one moves through the dreamlike sculptural landscape, the unique sound ecology of each water-recording site is experienced as one continuous flow. As water dissolves boundaries, so too does WATER Shadows, allowing for a rich diversity of voices to be heard.
WATER Shadows was inspired by an experience I had with water in the deep silence of winter, when mysterious ice patterns (*see photo) appeared on my studio window, right next to, and strangely akin to, the drawings I had been working on of ‘temple-like’ sculptures. The ice images looked like ‘water temples’ to me. In its own organic, language without words, water clearly had a voice. I was so intrigued by this experience with water that I wanted to help amplify its voice through my art, allowing it to speak for itself. I was also delighted by the synchronicity in discovering that in Bali there is an ancient system of ‘water temples’ called subaks, protected by UNESCO. To quote- ‘the temples are the focus of a co-operative water management system of canals and weirs that date back to the 9th century…the subak reflects the philosophical concept of Tri Hita Karana, which brings together the realms of spirit, the human world and nature.’ With root-systems and networks of all kinds being a main theme in my work, I took water up on its prompting, and WATER Shadows was initiated. I made my first field recording for this project of the creek (and cicada!) here on my land in Walter’s Falls, Ontario. The creek in my forest is a place of calm for me and interestingly, I live on land that is also part of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve system (the Niagara Escarpment Biosphere, specifically). This ‘water temple’ that emits the sound of watery soundscapes that I recorded in my community, is my personal invitation to the people of Grimsby to engage in this deep dialogue with water, just as I did in the art-making process itself. WATER Shadows is a place to gather and listen, to the voice of water and to each other. I encourage deep listening here, like Herman Hesse who writes, “They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
(*to view original WATER Shadows installation, click here)
