If the river could speak?
Rabbit brush alphabet, 2016.
The distinction between the journey of water within a river and my personal journey is a space I find interesting to examine in my artwork. If the river could speak emulates my empathy for a river’s journey. I learned in hydrological language that water is constantly on a journey because it acts as a transportation system for sediment, contaminants, energy, and nutrients. I use this knowledge about a river metaphorically in two ways:
1. The river as a messenger with intention to get from point A to point B to complete a delivery
2. The river as a fluid and complex ecosystem with interdependent components within itself.
Rivers are on a linear path, they have a mission, and within that mission is a medley of interconnected messages. In If the river could speak I imagine the medley of river water as a dialogue and I attempt to read the river. Along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico I made an alphabet out of dried rabbit brush stalks. I tossed the rabbit-brush English alphabet into the Rio Grande so that the river arranged the letters into a secret message for me to decode. The experiment lives in my documentation of the sketch and the photographs communicate a hopelessly playful approach to evaluating a biocentric world; a world where humans are ecologically part of nature, and thus are a shared community.
