This exhibition grew out of intimate experiences of water: a flood, a particular grief, and eventually my dream life. I've been making work about water for a while, but something shifted here — toward the bodily, the domestic, the broken and still-functioning.
A residency at Materials for the Arts opened the work in unexpected ways. The warehouse of donated objects (their color, texture, history of use) drew me toward improvisation and toward questions of desire, attachment, and memory. I began making stacks, rerouting objects, connecting them. I wanted them to speak to earth, to ruins, and to accumulation.
I was especially drawn to vessels. Of course, almost anything can be a vessel: a bowl, a room, a body. The objects in this exhibition are domestic and bodily at once. They are readable as household things, but also as organs, cavities, parts of fragile systems. The broken body still functions, like the broken ecosystem, patched together and held in continuous repair by the living system itself.
The sculptures are water systems, or suggestions of them, timekeepers that read time through dripping, seepage, saturation, and slow erosion. They move against industrial, abstract time and toward ecological time.
I thought of this exhibition as a large still life: plants, fruit, animals, pleasurable and decorative objects that carry, beneath the surface, traces of a damaged ecosystem and the extractive systems shaping our daily lives. Vanessa Andreotti writes in Hospicing Modernity, "We are all nested in a larger metabolism driven by a metabolic intelligence. If this metabolism is sick, so are we."
The title comes from Alejandra Pizarnik's poem of the same name, about a deep and agonizing love in which water carries pain. And, it carries all of us. What happens to water happens to our bodies, and to the bodies of the beings we live alongside. This exhibition is one way of listening to that.
Photographs by Stefan Hagen.