Touching: life (Interactive installation instructions)
Touching: life is an interactive environment. You are
invited to add the water you brought to the pool,
mixing it with water from around the area and
state, then re-fill the vessel with the pool
water and add it to the river… becoming
part of the energetic flow…
Touching: life
Water is our lifeblood: our bodies are made from it;
our daily life depends on it; our spirits draw nourishment
from it. In Michigan, we are surrounded by water; it defines who we
are as a state and as a people. Yet, it seems, we are the first to take our
water for granted. Water has always played an important part in my life,
yet it has only been in the last few years that water has asserted its important
presence in my art. Through several installation/performances in the last few years,
I have become seduced by all aspects of water: as a necessity, as a luxury,
as a commodity, as part of spirituality. Touching: Life deals with water, the essence
of life, on many levels. Water is a spiritual as well as a physical medium that sustains
and nurtures all the inhabitants (past, present and future) of this fragile earth.
It is life, always touching even when the cool wet life-blood is not felt upon
our skin. Our ancestral memory and myth whisper to us the power and
sacredness of water. It tells us we are born of water and we are carry into
the afterlife upon water. Water is a vehicle of spiritual
transformation. We are cleansed by
emersion in water. Yet these ripples of
water sustaining our body spirit
and soul is often unseen,
unacknowledged
or worse, ignored.
And now we bottle
and sell our water
with barely a second
thought. Ice Mountain
becomes the symbol of
our culture’s commodification
of our life-blood. Industry extracts,
contains and exports spring and glacial
water out of Michigan’s (our earth’s) aquifers
(subsidized by the State). We are connected.
The draining of irreplaceable glacial water from
our earth is the syringe withdrawing our body’s
sustaining life-blood. The political aspects of water
Is undeniable and inseparable from the social and
spiritual attributes. Michigan’s water is being pumped
and sold at the expense of the natural environment: rivers
and wells run dry, wildlife habitats, destroyed, yet pumping goes
on, unimpeded, until the aquifers go dry and Ice Mountain moves
on, leaving our future generations with only a memory of the water
that once was. From the life-lines upon our hands to the life-sustaining
lines of water upon (and within) our earth, water is our connection.
Water enables and becomes our touching of and with all that is life.
Touching: life is an interactive environment. You are
invited to add the water you brought to the pool,
mixing it with water from around the area and
state, then re-fill the vessel with the pool
water and add it to the river… becoming
part of the energetic flow…
Touching: life
Water is our lifeblood: our bodies are made from it;
our daily life depends on it; our spirits draw nourishment
from it. In Michigan, we are surrounded by water; it defines who we
are as a state and as a people. Yet, it seems, we are the first to take our
water for granted. Water has always played an important part in my life,
yet it has only been in the last few years that water has asserted its important
presence in my art. Through several installation/performances in the last few years,
I have become seduced by all aspects of water: as a necessity, as a luxury,
as a commodity, as part of spirituality. Touching: Life deals with water, the essence
of life, on many levels. Water is a spiritual as well as a physical medium that sustains
and nurtures all the inhabitants (past, present and future) of this fragile earth.
It is life, always touching even when the cool wet life-blood is not felt upon
our skin. Our ancestral memory and myth whisper to us the power and
sacredness of water. It tells us we are born of water and we are carry into
the afterlife upon water. Water is a vehicle of spiritual
transformation. We are cleansed by
emersion in water. Yet these ripples of
water sustaining our body spirit
and soul is often unseen,
unacknowledged
or worse, ignored.
And now we bottle
and sell our water
with barely a second
thought. Ice Mountain
becomes the symbol of
our culture’s commodification
of our life-blood. Industry extracts,
contains and exports spring and glacial
water out of Michigan’s (our earth’s) aquifers
(subsidized by the State). We are connected.
The draining of irreplaceable glacial water from
our earth is the syringe withdrawing our body’s
sustaining life-blood. The political aspects of water
Is undeniable and inseparable from the social and
spiritual attributes. Michigan’s water is being pumped
and sold at the expense of the natural environment: rivers
and wells run dry, wildlife habitats, destroyed, yet pumping goes
on, unimpeded, until the aquifers go dry and Ice Mountain moves
on, leaving our future generations with only a memory of the water
that once was. From the life-lines upon our hands to the life-sustaining
lines of water upon (and within) our earth, water is our connection.
Water enables and becomes our touching of and with all that is life.
