Water
is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, able to sculpt
rock and rearrange shorelines. It is also the gentlest of elements,
cradling our bodies as we float on its surface, cooling and reviving
us as we drink or bathe. We are made of water; human societies could
not have coalesced without a source of water. It is both cosmic
clock, registering the cyclic pull of moon and planets, and broad
liquid highway. Shorelines and river courses are our landmarks and
boundaries, yet the ceaseless action of waves, tides, and flowing
water erases the marks of our passage. For environmental philosopher
Gary Snyder, water writes the ultimate divisions and regions of
our planet:
The
surface [of the earth] is carved into watersheds -- a kind of
familial branching, a chart of relationships, and a definition
of place. The watershed is the first and the last nation whose
boundaries, though subtly shifting, are unarguable...For the watershed,
cities and dams are ephemeral and of no more account than a boulder
that falls in the river or a landslide that temporarily alters
the channel. The water will always be there and it will always
find its way down.
For
the past twenty years, water has exerted its powerful and seductive
force on Basia Irland. Her sculpture, and the accompanying photographic
and video documentation, is an extended investigation of and hymn
to water. As her work acknowledges all of the manifestations of
water, it engages critical issues surrounding the use and abuse
of water sources throughout the world. Irland is an artist working
at the intersection of environmental issues, governmental policy,
human rights, and natural science, always informed by an awareness
of the spiritual dimensions of water.
The
sculptures in this exhibition explore watery markings: the ways
in which water inscribes its presence, and the ways in which people
attempt to diagram and understand its movements. In most cases the
objects were made on-site with local materials. They all acknowledge
the specificity of that incarnation of water, whether it be in the
waves of a tropical sea or locked up in the mass of a glacier. Recurring
motifs in this series are the book, the map, and the chart -- elements
of our attempt to plot the location and trajectory of this important
resource and to locate ourselves in the cosmos. Irland juxtaposes
the human impulse to chart -- whether U.S. Geological Survey maps,
aerial photographs, or archeoastronomy drawing from ancient cultures
-- with the power of water to inscribe itself on the rocks beneath
a glacier or in the marks of the tide.
Water
is constantly moving, either flowing through the land it shapes
or transmuting from one state to another -- liquid, solid, vapor.
As it moves through the landscape, water carries our cultures and
languages, as well as our garbage. The earliest highways beckoning
explorers and traders were rivers and channels between islands.
Great expanses of water were barriers to movement that ancient humans
navigated by charting the position of celestial bodies, the tools
of archeoastronomy.
The
journey is a central preoccupation in Irland's work. It is in the
course of her own journeys that she makes art that plots the mysteries
of water. It is for the journeyer that she crafts her sculptures.
They are constructed to contain necessities for travel and to become
repositories for the record of the trip -- the maps, charts, photographs,
books, and videos. Kit for Paddling through Stars Floating on
a Lake folds into a case that is wheeled to the edge of the
lake. Once there, it opens, the carved, linden wood paddles come
out for assembly, maps and aerial photographs may be consulted,
and the voyager puts in to the water. This piece was constructed
so that the traveler could paddle to a floating observatory where
the infinite text of stars and constellations speaks of direction
and limitless space. While canoeing across the surface of the lake
the the observatory, he/she paddles across the reflection of the
celestial map. The way is at once, in Margaret Atwood's words, "clear
and obscure".
The
intimate connection between sculpture and the body, the traveler's
gear and the culture of his/her watershed, is most pronounced in
Of Pelicans and Palapas. It is carried with a tumpline across
the forehead in the same way that generations of people in the region
have carried their burdens. Estuary Drawings is a hexagonal
toolbox for a trip along the ever-changing margins of estuaries
and deltas. Along the way, the artist stopped to inscribe archeoastronomy
charts in the sand, charts that the waves smoothed away. The photograph
and the video are the record of this interchange between the impulse
to diagram and the resistance of water to the confines of the chart.
Irland's
work also inscribes her long engagement with the book, the map,
and the library. No serious journeyer/explorer sets out to follow
a river or a shoreline without a logbook. From notations in the
logbook one could translate the bends of a river, the fall of the
land, the contours of the shore into lines on a map. Ancient travelers
plotted their way by stars, moon, and sun, and left the record of
their charts inscribed on rock faces. Irland's mapping of our intricate
relations with water is translated into "books" that become
part of her sculptor's Library of Waters. The book in Estuary
Drawings is written in salmon bones embedded in pages formed
from the soil of the estuary. A box of birch bark pages accompanies
Kit for Paddling through Stars Floating on a Lake. The curving
slabs of bark are perforated with striations from the tree's growth
cycles and the action of wind, animals, and insects on its bark.
The books for Ice Fields are the most ancient texts, their
lines scraped into rocks by the frozen weight of the Athabascan
Glacier are formed by calcified water bubbles trapped in the matrix
of stones cast up on the shore of Lake Superior. These are books
that would be at home in Jorge Luis Borge's The Library of Babel,
which he described as limitless, periodic, and containing in
myriad languages nothing less than the entire universe. Irland herself
resembles Borge's librarian, a traveler, constantly searching the
books of the great library, trying to decipher meaning from texts
written with "organic letters...exact, delicate, intense."
--
KATHLEEN STEWART HOWE
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