An
interview with Basia Irland
by
David Williams
Bath, England, April 2001
David
Williams: Almost all of your work is concerned with water in one
way or another: water as focus for a critical engagement with environmental
and cultural issues, water as protean event, navigatory flow, material
imagination: water as singularity and multiplicity. The work you're
exhibiting here in Bath, Non-potable Agua, focuses on water as medium
or carrier, in this instance of micro-pathenogens. You've printed
magnified images of cells, giardia lamblia and escherichia coli,
to produce a blurring of micro and macro; the fact that they look
like planetary bodies serves to highlight the terrible beauty of
these organisms.
Basia
Irland: Once the organisms were enlarged, I very purposefully wanted
them to be beautiful. I'm usually attracted to things that are marked
and weathered, muddied, things that have a toughness and grottiness
to them - objects that have a kind of life story. But these had
to be alluring for the very reason you allude to: the dichotomy
of a 'terrible beauty'. For the tragic reality is that such water-borne
diseases cause the death of a child, somewhere in the world every
eight minutes.
While I was in Indonesia I contracted giardia. On one of the scrolls
in the exhibition here in Bath is an image of a skin sample cross
section infected with giardia lamblia, which appears to be an aerial
view of a green fertile field. Other scrolls contain one large image
of an individual Giardia parasite. The scroll is another form of
book. These can be displayed on the wall or rolled up, put into
clear tubes and carried over your shoulder.
On another
scroll what looks like a planet with its orange moon is actually
Escherichia Coli. Several years ago, the inhabitants of Walkerton,
Ontario, Canada, turned on their kitchen faucets to get a drink,
just the way millions of people do every day. But seven people died
and hundreds were hospitalized because e-coli from a nearby feed
lot had seeped into the city's drinking water supply.
Since the 1970's, visitors and residents of Bath have been prohibited
from soaking in the ancient Roman Baths after one bather died from
amoebic meningic encephalitis. The 'Bath Bug' is naegleria fowleri
and is found around the world in natural hot springs. Vibrio cholerae,
legionella, plesiomonas shigelloides and acinetobacter baumanii
are a few of the tongue-twistingly named water-borne infections
which will eventually find their way onto a scroll, their beautiful,
colorful images belying their deadly nature.
And
you're right, I'm captivated by the relations between micro and
macro. When you're flying over a river delta, you can see all those
dentritic patterns that are formed by water flow. This connects
with tree patterns, blood vessels and circulatory systems, synaptic
activity, the branchings and connections in our brains ...
DW:
These homologies recur in your work. As do marks, lines, graphic
traces left by water in its various manifestations. In a recent
catalogue, you write about diagrams you made on a beach, pre-Keplerian
archaeoastronomical mappings of the tug of planetary bodies on terrestrial
bodies of water, with the rhythmic lap of waves gradually effecting
an erasure. And you go on to describe scars on a whale's back, and
the impact of a glacier's movement on rock surfaces. You seem to
celebrate giving over 'authorship' to elements and natural processes,
or at least a desire to collaborate with them.
BI:
As a conceptually-based artist, I'm concerned with the processes
of making work. I'm interested in all the different processes that
go on daily in nature. In British Columbia, on the Athabascan Glacier,
what engaged me was the way the glacier moves across the land leaving
behind inscriptions, signatures, an eternal language of long-term
processes. As the ice shifts pebbles mark the rock beneath it.
My most
recent museum show was entitled Inscriptions: Stars, Tides and Ice.
And a large, smooth stone I brought back from the glacier with dozens
of lines etched into its surface was included in the exhibition.
Both glaciers and artists inscribe, we make marks. When you're out
in the desert, you see plants that have been blown back and forth
by the wind, and they make little fan-shaped patterns in the sand.
When water laps up onto shore, it makes marks. These processes relate
to time, they take time and occur through time.
DW:
Your work seems to encourage a quality of patient attention a little
like the Renaissance 'festina lente': make haste slowly. In this
way it resists certain contemporary commodity culture rhythms, proposing
a realignment with the rhythms of organic processes, a deceleration
into taking or making time ...
BI:
Well, the Gathering of Waters project, which I'll discuss later,
took almost five years, and it's still continuing. I hope it will
just keep on going at its own pace. Each piece I do develops over
time, due to the research phase, travelling to places to gather
natural materials, working with and learning from local residents,
and detailed construction of each work.
DW:
It's evident you have a fascination for boats, connected to your
interests in water and journeys. The boats you've made are somewhat
anthropomorphic, structurally reminiscent of ribcages, and they
interpenetrate human and animal in both form and materials.
BI:
Ilove canoeing. My son grew up in a canoe on northern Ontario lakes.
There's something very serene about being out on the water of a
lake; rivers can be little less predictable, I've capsized several
times and it can be scary. I enjoy the physicality and practicality
of travelling by means of self-propulsion on water in this way.
It's a kind of swimming.
Some
of my sculptural boats were indeed anthropomorphised or had animal
aspects. Some had fish tails, a lot of them had wings. I like the
image of a winged boat. In some cultures, boats are the carriers
of the soul, just as the crescent moon was seen as a boat form of
similar function. The vikings buried their dead in rock formations
in the shape of a boat. And I'm also drawn to paddles, sculpturally,
and their relationship with the human body. The shape of a boat
is often, though not always, a mandorla: the intersection of two
circles. It's the vaginal form, an eye shape. Several of my portable
pieces open up to make this shape.
DW:
Additional ambiguities come from the fact that your boats often
float in the air. They are present and absent, line drawings of
vessels that may have been there once or are yet to come. They are
both gravity-bound and airborne. For me, they are reveries, invitations
to travel connecting up with all sorts of notions of journeying...
BI:
When I originally made the suspended boat pieces in Canada, they
were bent willow covered with light-emitting diodes; in a darkened
environment, as an artist I was creating my own constellations.
In a Santa Fe exhibition, I suspended forty boats, made from welded
black wire, covered with salt crystals, in an open atrium area three
floors high. In the low light, shadows were cast by the boats.
DW: Salt has recurred in your work in different ways, and I know
it has a diverse set of associations for you. In an essay in which
he talks metaphorically of salt as 'felt experience', the crystalline
savour of lived experience, James Hillman quotes from an alchemical
treatise The Golden Tract: "He who works without salt will
never raise dead bodies". In alchemy salt is related to body,
and it shares the same symbol as water, as I understand it ...
BI:
Yes, I've used the alchemical symbol for salt in my work, it's a
circle with a horizontal line through it. My interest in salt works
at a number of levels. First of all, the practical: I like working
with it as a material -- white on white on white. I like the physical
properties of salt. I did a series of pieces where I carved salt
licks. In one of them, I carved into the salt lick and embedded
in the niche salt crystals that had grown in the sacred lake at
Zuni, given to me by a geologist.
My engagement
in salt as a marine evaporate grew out of my research into water.
I had a Fullbright in Indonesia, and spent quite a bit of time in
Bali and Java; in Bali they farm the salt from the beaches.
Salt is used in almost every culture in diverse ways. In Japan,
for example, Sumo wrestlers scatter salt before their bouts. The
history of salt is alluring - the ways in which it's been traded
at various times ounce for ounce for gold. Gandhi's salt march in
1930 was a plea for independence and non-violence in the context
of colonialisation. I'd like to go to the Rumanian underground salt
caves where salt has been mined for years. Sculptors began working
down there and carved elaborate statues and even chandeliers out
of salt. Then it was discovered that the miners rarely contracted
tuberculosis. The salt takes moisture out of the air. Now they've
opened one area of the mine as a hospital - hospital beds in a salt
mine is an amazing image.
DW:
Like water, salt is ambiguous as a material, both health-giving
and highly toxic in certain contexts. A lot of the materials you
use operate poetically in this way, exfoliating multiple and ambiguous
associations ...
BI:
Which is why I use them.
DW:
And the materials you use are often imbricated in organic or entropic
processes ...
BI:
I don't believe there is really any such thing as a static object.
Everything, our bodies, that chair over there, an orchid, a piece
of steel, is changing and decaying at various rates of speed.
As much
as possible I like using materials from the site where I'm working,
because they speak of that site. The rucksack that I made for The
Gathering of Waters was constructed of wood from an old church in
Albuquerque that was torn down; then I covered it with layers of
pinon pine sap, so it's aromatic, it smells of the forest.
DW: A lot of your work registers different actions and interventions
of your own, and gives itself over to contexts and processes outside
of your control; and at the same time it seems to encourage a kind
of active embodied receptivity.
BI:
Yes. And as I've suggested all of my work is concerned with process.
I'm interested in ephemerality, what the Japanese call mujo, which
is translated as 'the bittersweet impermanence of all life'.
DW:
Early on, you made a series of ephemeral floating pieces which seem
to be a precursor to your later work with books: free-floating scriptable
surfaces or 'pages' released into a range of other fluid processes.
BI:
I did a lot of floating pieces in Canada: academic 'lessons', chalk
marks on canvas with some elements erased, which were embedded in
ice and then floated down rivers. And I would follow them, track
their journeys, and eventually retrieve the canvas from the shoreline.
I would also go into university lecture rooms after classes to record
photographically the traces, erasures, and fragments on blackboards
- the poetics of traces and erasures that were left on the blackboards
in the wake of a lesson. I documented them all over the world, often
in languages I couldn't understand. A fragmentary, elliptical, found
poetry. At this time, referencing the death of my husband, I created
a large, complex performance work, The Metaphysics of Erasures.
DW:
Your carved wooden books use materials that come from what's there
in specific sites. There are narratives buried in these 'books of
nature', or 'hydrolibros' as you've called them. The 'texts' they
contain relate associatively to ecological issues. In one book made
in the Dominican Republic, you used fragments of crocodile skulls.
You've also used turtle shells, for example, or salmon bones, always
from specific contexts. It seems you conceive of all of your work
as a kind of library-in-process, a living transforming archive within
which the gaps in maps are inviting and active. When did you start
making the earth-covered book pieces?
BI:
When I moved to New Mexico. These carved wooden book shapes are
coated with earth from a certain location and are inscribed on the
edges to resemble paginated volumes. Then I use small found natural
objects from the site that have something to say about that specific
place, and create a kind of international ecological language as
'text'. For example, Molybedenum Mine Volumes I and II commemorate
a huge scar that gapes across acres of abused wilderness in northern
New Mexico. Wandering illegally among the heaps of discarded mining
equipment, the 'text' I found for this book was fool's gold and
rust - poetic justice for this site, the tailings of which have
killed aquatic habitat for miles downstream in the Red River. The
names of a few of these sculptural books are Moss Agate Archive,
about a trip along the length of the Yellowstone, the only major
undammed river in the US; Beaver Stick Encyclopedia, using numerous
chewed beaver sticks; Rain Forest (Black Sand and Turtle Egg Shells),
about Costa Rica.
There
is also a series called River Books, which began when I discovered
that some library had dumped part of its collection in a gorge near
Taos, and the books had been lying in the open air for years; there
were rabbit turds on them, grass was growing up through the pages,
people had used them for target practice, and they were completely
rotten. These grotty objects attracted me as part of a generative
cyclical transformation. These books had been trees once, then they
were in a library in paper form, then were outside again, dumped
into a huge pile - and it was as if those words were returning back
into the earth. I took them into the studio, dried them out, then
halted the process of deterioration into further decay by covering
them in layers of beeswax, and then suspending them. Through the
amber translucency of the beeswax, some of the words are still legible
but not all ...
DW:
A lot of the books, like your other work, construct a tension between
information revealed and withheld, between transparency and opacity
or containment: partial revelations. And I think it was Thoreau
who wrote something about decayed literature making the best soil.
This cycle of a return to the earth is a resonant ecological loop,
another oroboros.
Perhaps
it's inevitable that books, maps, charts, logs, registers and traces
of journeys and fragile sites, and so on, should come together in
the form of 'libraries'. I'm thinking both in terms of the portable
repositories you make, and in terms of your unfinished novel The
Library of Waters, which you've described as a kind of praise poem
based on the hydrological cycle. I very much enjoyed the fragment
I have read, its self-reflexive connections with your ongoing water
work, as well as its interrogative relationship to the very project
of a library: the claim to knowing represented by mapping, charting,
collecting, categorising, cataloguing, archiving. And related to
this, its fundamental in-finitude: it seems uncompletable. The very
materials of the library - in this case water - resist the fixities
and orderly containments of the institutional apparatus, and there
is a great play-ful tension in this resistance and ultimate overflowing.
Does the writing of The Library of Waters represent part of a navigation
of your twin roles as artist and academic, working with very different
kinds of knowledges and experiences?
BI:
Absolutely. I love books and respect book knowledge. But it is only
ever partial, a complement to experiential knowledges which are
harder to articulate but almost always more meaningful. In the video
documentary I made for The Gathering of Waters project, I say that
this is not about sitting in a boardroom or classroom indoors theorising
about rivers, it's about physically being at the river and experiencing
it first-hand.
DW:
That's very palpable in your documentary film, A Gathering of Waters;
The Rio Grande, Source to Sea - showing people's individual and
collective engagements in embodied ways with the cultures of the
river, in terms of community, bio-diversity, connectivities and
flows, and the enormous physical joy people have in relation to
water in the film. As a proposition and an actuality, it's a wonderful
project: a grassroots, community-based initiative to collect and
convey water from a river's source all along its course to a release
point in the sea at the Gulf of Mexico. How did it come about?
BI:
The Gathering of Waters project came about for several reasons.
Because the Rio completely dries up and becomes a river of sand
in several places due to natural drought and human mismanagement,
we wanted to help it do something it can no longer do by itself
- flow all the way to the ocean. I also wanted people to be aware
that there is always an upstream and a downstream, and to connect
diverse communities along the entire 1,875-mile length, to form
an on-going dialogue.
I had been travelling internationally and making work, but I wanted
to do something that was of the area where I live my daily life.
The Rio Grande runs right through Albuquerque. I was attending river
meetings and people described the river as if it were a cut-up pie
with the middle Rio Grande disconnected from anything upstream or
downstream; it had no beginning and no end.
Originally, there was a lot of skepticism about whether such a project
could be realised. However I refused to listen and in 1995 I began
in Southern Colorado, at the headwaters in a beautiful alpine meadow
area in the San Juan mountains, with pine trees and waterfalls.
From there the river flows through New Mexico, forms the border
between Texas and Mexico in the vast Chijuahuan desert, and eventually
enters a Palm Grove at the Gulf. This is all the same river, but
incredibly different contexts.
A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed by the carrier
downstream from one community to the next. Small water samples were
added from each community as hundreds of people extended a hand
to someone upstream, received the Vessel, added their own contribution
of water from the Rio, wrote in the Log Book, and passed these along
to another person downstream. Folks travelled with the River Vessel
and its accompanying Log Book by boat, raft, canoe, hot-air balloon,
car, van, horseback, truck, bicycle, mail and by foot - all the
way to the sea. My aim was for the gathering and passing of the
waters to restore symbolically a natural function of the river and
generate understanding, enthusiasm, and a sense of continuity and
a mutual understanding of riverside communities. It was a celebration
of this great river and its cultures.
Native
American runners carried the vessel through numerous pueblo villages.
Running is a sacred activity for many tribal peoples around the
world, it's considered a form of prayer; and they were really pleased
to be involved in such a way, carrying the water by running. They
ran about 150 miles in two days in a relay of mile long sections.
As we went into each pueblo - and none of this could be filmed -
there was an exchange of water. They would put water into the canteen,
and we would give them some of the water already gathered - an affirming
of connections. People who lived half an hour apart but had never
met encountered each other through this project. In the film, the
ranger who hands on the vessel to the Kickapoo Tribe had never met
any members of that community; and they're still working together
now. Those kinds of connections were one of the most important aspects
of the project as a whole. They take on a life of their own.
The
Gathering project took its own time. And when it finally arrived
at Boca Chica in late 1998, we had a huge celebration down there
at the mouth of the river by the ocean; people flew from the Upper
Basin, the Lower Basin, at their own expense. They wanted to be
there for that final moment of releasing the waters gathered from
the river into the sea. It felt like an act of compassion, a gift.
And such a 'gathering' could be created anywhere internationally;
it doesn't belong to me.
DW:
The structure of this project offers a very simple strategy for
enabling and affirming connections en route, a navigatory reparation
of separation. And it's endlessly relocatable and redefinable as
a performative social score. I know you've made a simpler version
by the Don River in Toronto, for example, which you describe as
a stream 'straightjacketed' between a four-lane highway and railroad
tracks.
BI: Yes. This project can hopefully help inspire other riverside
communities anywhere in the world to find their common heritage.
And each 'gathering' will be different, because each river is a
different being.
DW:
One of your more recent works, Kit for Paddling Through Stars Floating
on a Lake, which you made at Lac Jumeau in Quebec in 2000, is very
much a navigatory score that seems to bring together a number of
recurrent fascinations. Could you describe this work and its making?
BI:
When I left New Mexico for the residency in Canada, I had no idea
what I was going to do when I arrived. Three of us were invited
by a group called boréal to make work in the Laurentian Mountains
in Northern Quebec. The group's focus is on ecological issues. During
my stay, there was one artist from Italy, one from Mexico and myself.
The other two artists chose to go off into the forest and work there,
but I walked out onto the dock by the lake and worked there the
whole time. I would get up at dawn and paddle through mist, which
was incredibly mysterious and beautiful. It was the one time of
day when the lake was still, and you could immerse yourself in this
thick fog.
As I
said, I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived. There
was an old canoe which no one else would go in because it was very
tippy. I decided I'd carve my own paddles. So I started out with
these two huge linden logs, or limewood, and began carving. On one
side of the paddle I put images of the constellations, the night
sky over Quebec in the winter; on the other side was a map of where
we were, Lac Jumeau, 'Twin Lake'. I devised different handles for
them and designed the two paddles so that they could even be joined
together like a kayak paddle.
I made
a long box to contain all the pieces, and put wheels on it so it
could be pulled. I've returned again and again to this idea of portability.
On the inside lid of the box were aerial maps of the lake, photos
of stars floating on the water and mud from the lake shore mixed
with matt medium.
The paddles worked well, and at night I would fill the boat with
candles and ferry people out to a floating dock. There was an old
Adirondack chair out there, and I made a shelter with aromatic cedar
boughs. So the floating platform became a one-person arched observatory
that you could sit within to contemplate the lake and stars - to
be on a floating platform quietly by yourself.
DW: The video image from this work reproduced in your catalogue
suggests an enactment of a nekyia, a night water crossing, to a
liminal still point that hovers between a reflection of the sky
in the lake's surface and the sky itself. It looks a little like
being on one of your airborne boats riding through the sky ...
BI:
That's a nice comparison. For the video of the Quebec piece, I floated
candles in the water and they formed another layer of constellations.
The image you're referring to, I photographed very early in the
morning in the mist, so that you can't see the horizon and can't
tell which direction is up or down. And I used that ambiguous image
in the catalogue because I wanted the idea of the journey to something
about which you're not quite certain - which is what our lives are
like. Navigatory processes. We never know what's around the next
bend in the river. A lot of my work relates metaphorically or literally
to navigation. It's also concerned with currents: currents in water,
but also being in the current of the present moment. In any negotiation
of the moment, one needs to orient oneself by attending to energies
that are actually there.
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