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Water-inspired art highlights environmental and social justice issues

Posted on by angelo
Water-inspired art highlights environmental and social justice issues

SASHA FROM THE DORPS
Taos

Sasha de Dorp He set out to find sound. After learning that sounds had a shape, he began searching for its shapes and a medium that would respond to its waves. The answer was water. “It ended up opening up this wild world,” vom Dorp explains.

Sound creates a wave in the water, and then sunlight hits those waves, refracting and reflecting them. His ethereal, abstract photographs of this process, captured faster than the eye can see, feature hundreds of sparkling reflections of the sun. A video, 222.22 Hz – Surface tension 36°24’22”N 105°34’31”Wspans 13 minutes over a 10-second period. It shows how a sound broadcast at a certain frequency creates water droplets that drift on the surface of the water before breaking its tension and disappearing. The aim was to rethink how people interact with simple, everyday elements, such as light and water.

“That’s really what’s at the heart of my work: the natural world, the beauty it holds, and the value of our resources, especially living here in the desert,” he says. Vom Dorp knows the realities of that life well: He grew up on a farm in San Cristobal, has been using acequias since he was a child, and still irrigates his own pastures (in exchange, he produces asparagus and strawberries). As president and resident of the Acequia de los Sanchez, he’s keenly aware that if the snowpack is low, the crops won’t be watered. And without water, he says, he wouldn’t be able to create his work, either.

Hand carved ice sculpture by Basia Irland with native riverine seeds, Santa Fe River Ice Book VI.
Photograph courtesy of Basia Irland.

BASIA IRELAND
Albuquerque

Basia Ireland has traveled the nearly 1,900-mile Río Grande twice, documenting the journey for his artwork and activism, including his Books on Ice: Ice Retreat/Book Reseeding Project. The carved ice books are adorned with native seeds and represent the scientific knowledge needed to address climate change and watersheds stripped of their native vegetation. Released into rivers in New Mexico, the United States, and around the world, the books melt and release their seeds, returning these waterways to their original state.

A few years ago, when Irland teamed up with another professor from the University of New Mexico to teach a class, she asked her hydrology students, “How many of you have ever been to the river here?” Only a few hands went up in the huge lecture hall. “So this was their very first assignment,” says Irland, who told them, “I don’t want you to bring friends or spouses or dogs. I just want you to go sit by the river.”

Listening to the waterways—as she does every week, traveling from her home near Albuquerque to visit the Río Grande, “just to be with her and know how she’s doing”—has also been at the heart of the temporary works Irland installed along the Santa Fe River last year. Contemplation Stations The benches are cocoon-like seats woven from plant materials, such as tamarisk, willow and river rush gathered along the banks. From these seats, river visitors focus on the water, the rhythm of birdsong, the light on the rapids, the smell of a mud-rich river in spring. This is how it should be, says Irland – we should take the time to stop, to ask the rivers on which we depend for life in the desert how they are doing and what we might do for them.

Textile artist Janette Terrazas creates natural dyes by combining water from the Rio Grande with cochineal. She documents the sites where the water was harvested and the changing pH of the water develops a variety of hues.
Photographs courtesy of Janette Terrazas.

JANETTE TERRAZAS
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Janette Terrazas observed what was left of the Río Grande River flowing through Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, looking for ways to draw attention to the inequitable distribution of the river and its water, the systemic racism inherent in these choices, the problems faced by people living downstream, and the challenges faced by birds like storks that migrate through this troubled environment.

“It was very moving to see these beautiful birds in the middle of the garbage and polluted waters,” she says. “So I started paying more attention to them and expressing through my art what is happening.”

The textile artist, who works with natural dyes, began taking water samples, mixing them with cochineal, an insect that typically produces a rich red dye, and using the resulting dye to color sections of yarn. When the river’s pH changes due to pollution or heavy metals, the color shifts to shades of gray, purple, blue, orange, magenta, and brown. She also created a series of photographs and drawings documenting what she finds along the river from its source in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico.

She plans to travel to Colorado and New Mexico this summer to collect samples. The photographs and drawings—ducks, egrets, geese, and other waterfowl and wildlife that appear along her journey—along with renderings of the “color trail” and pH tests are being compiled into a book. “The river is not just something that you can say, ‘From here to here, it’s a river, and from here to here, it’s not,’” she says. “It’s horrific what we’re facing right now in terms of ecosystemic and environmental racism.”

Learn more: Ancient Zuni practice of waffle farming may be response to drought-deprived crops.