Jjenna Hupp Andrews
  • Home
    • Contact
  • Artwork
    • Current Work >
      • Invisibility is a Superpower
    • Dad, Disappearing
    • Pieta, Gaia
    • Victory of St Wilgefortis, St of Non-Binary & Trans People
    • Creativity in the Time of Covid 19
    • Suffer the little children series >
      • Suffer the Little Children...
      • Suffer the little children, COVID-19 Portrait Series
      • Suffer the little children... War/Refugee Portrait Series
      • Postcards from the forgotten edge of forever
    • SAY HER/HIS/THEIR NAME
    • Selected Artwork
    • Exhibitions >
      • Forms and Figures - 2025
      • Muskegon Museum of Art’s 95th Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition
      • SAC's Upcycle Art in the Park - 2025
      • BBAC Michigan Fine Arts Competition -2024
      • Fiber Art Now - Excellence In Fibers IX
      • Fiber Art Now - Fiber Reimagined II - 2024
      • Creativity in the Time of Covid-19
      • Of Revolutions, Revelations, Resolutions (and of those left forgotten in between)
      • Mott Art Faculty Exhibition -GFAC
      • The 19th Amendment at 100
      • STATUS 2019
      • Flint City Artists 2019
      • Flint: More than Just Water, and Exhibition
      • ArtPATH Lansing 2018
      • Lifeblood
      • Artists Treading Water
      • Nomadic Boarderlands
      • Second Skin
      • All They Survey
      • Liminal
      • Touching Life
      • intervals…interfaces…interstices
  • Teaching
    • Teaching Philosophy >
      • Teaching Philosophy Essay
    • Courses >
      • Course Descriptions
    • Student Artwork >
      • Drawing 1
      • Two-Dimensional Design
      • Three-Dimensional Design
      • Sculpture
      • In the Studio
    • Professional Development
  • Publications
    • Published Exhibitions
    • Books >
      • Flint Water Crisis
      • Lost In Media
      • Dissertation
    • Articles
    • Presentations >
      • Inclusive Language in the Remote Learning Environment
      • The Water Within LAND Conference 2-7-19
      • Facing College: Engaging International and Immigrant Students through a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Storytelling Project.
      • Seek & Find: Connections
      • Contemporary Artists as Stewardship
      • Act! Do Something
      • Wangechi Mutu
      • Ask me Why I'm RAD
      • Exploring ‘My Place(s) in this World’
      • Watching a Revolution
    • Speaking Engagements >
      • Featured Artist Talk - Creativity in the Time of Covid-19
      • Multiple Identities, Two Cultures, One Voice: The Art & Activism of Contemporary Afro-Latina & Afro-Latinx-Q Artists
      • Don't tell me what to do: Creative Careers Vol. 1
      • The Aesthetic Lens: Engaging Sociopolitical Injustice Through Art
      • Artists Treading Water
      • Social Justice Speaker in Residence
    • Press >
      • Student Project
      • Donor Mural
    • CV
  • Blog

Touching: Life
​2004

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.
 


  • Home
    • Contact
  • Artwork
    • Current Work >
      • Invisibility is a Superpower
    • Dad, Disappearing
    • Pieta, Gaia
    • Victory of St Wilgefortis, St of Non-Binary & Trans People
    • Creativity in the Time of Covid 19
    • Suffer the little children series >
      • Suffer the Little Children...
      • Suffer the little children, COVID-19 Portrait Series
      • Suffer the little children... War/Refugee Portrait Series
      • Postcards from the forgotten edge of forever
    • SAY HER/HIS/THEIR NAME
    • Selected Artwork
    • Exhibitions >
      • Forms and Figures - 2025
      • Muskegon Museum of Art’s 95th Michigan Contemporary Art Exhibition
      • SAC's Upcycle Art in the Park - 2025
      • BBAC Michigan Fine Arts Competition -2024
      • Fiber Art Now - Excellence In Fibers IX
      • Fiber Art Now - Fiber Reimagined II - 2024
      • Creativity in the Time of Covid-19
      • Of Revolutions, Revelations, Resolutions (and of those left forgotten in between)
      • Mott Art Faculty Exhibition -GFAC
      • The 19th Amendment at 100
      • STATUS 2019
      • Flint City Artists 2019
      • Flint: More than Just Water, and Exhibition
      • ArtPATH Lansing 2018
      • Lifeblood
      • Artists Treading Water
      • Nomadic Boarderlands
      • Second Skin
      • All They Survey
      • Liminal
      • Touching Life
      • intervals…interfaces…interstices
  • Teaching
    • Teaching Philosophy >
      • Teaching Philosophy Essay
    • Courses >
      • Course Descriptions
    • Student Artwork >
      • Drawing 1
      • Two-Dimensional Design
      • Three-Dimensional Design
      • Sculpture
      • In the Studio
    • Professional Development
  • Publications
    • Published Exhibitions
    • Books >
      • Flint Water Crisis
      • Lost In Media
      • Dissertation
    • Articles
    • Presentations >
      • Inclusive Language in the Remote Learning Environment
      • The Water Within LAND Conference 2-7-19
      • Facing College: Engaging International and Immigrant Students through a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Storytelling Project.
      • Seek & Find: Connections
      • Contemporary Artists as Stewardship
      • Act! Do Something
      • Wangechi Mutu
      • Ask me Why I'm RAD
      • Exploring ‘My Place(s) in this World’
      • Watching a Revolution
    • Speaking Engagements >
      • Featured Artist Talk - Creativity in the Time of Covid-19
      • Multiple Identities, Two Cultures, One Voice: The Art & Activism of Contemporary Afro-Latina & Afro-Latinx-Q Artists
      • Don't tell me what to do: Creative Careers Vol. 1
      • The Aesthetic Lens: Engaging Sociopolitical Injustice Through Art
      • Artists Treading Water
      • Social Justice Speaker in Residence
    • Press >
      • Student Project
      • Donor Mural
    • CV
  • Blog