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green museum.org Fern Shaffer and Othello Anderson
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David Haley
John Lyall
Ballet Atlantique-Regine Chopinot
Opening Essay Introducing the Artists Links and Readings
Hester Reeve Basia Irland


 

A Gathering of Waters: The Rio Grande, Source to the Sea

 

 

 

 

 

Basia Irland’s work, as sculptor and installation artist, as poet and book artist, and as activist has, for the past twenty years, engaged with and sanctified water. The water that carries, that falls, that transforms life, that inscribes on sand, that bears disease, that transports the imagination, water in all its incarnations inspires much of her work.

The importance of process and ephemerality are evident in Irland's recurrent themes - the journey, navigation, the orientation of oneself within the current of life. Irland's work mediates the performative and the visual arts, incorporating the movements of flow and transformation with the artefactual. The book, the map, the chart are the guides for and translations of the journeys in her work.

As an artist and activist, Irland crosses between the arts, policy-making and the natural sciences, manifesting in all those realms a political and spiritual engagement with environmental and social issues. 

http://www.unm.edu/~basia/BIRLAND

A GATHERING OF WATERS: THE RIO GRANDE, SOURCE TO THE SEA

1995 – 2000 and continuing

Can diverse communities, living along any river, creek or stream, work and celebrate together on a grassroots level to raise awareness about the plight of the world's waterways?

A Gathering of Waters focuses on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, which flows out of Colorado, through New Mexico, and into the vast Chihuahuan Desert between Texas and Mexico. Beset by too many human controls and too many human demands, the river can no longer assure that water from the Rocky Mountain highlands will empty into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gathering project, begun in 1995, was conceived as a symbolic carrying of Rio Grande/Rio Bravo's waters from source to sea, to re-establish people's connection with the river and with each other along its 1,875 mile length. A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed downstream, from community to community, from hand-to-hand. Small water samples were added from each community as hundreds of people extended a hand 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. People who lived half an hour apart but had never met, encountered each other through this project. And each community confirmed again their connection to the Rio.

The gathering and passing of the waters was 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 the great river and its cultures.

The Gathering project took its own time. And when it finally arrived at Boca Chica there was a huge celebration. People flew from the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin. 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. Such a 'gathering' could be created anywhere internationally. It doesn’t belong to the artist.

River Repository

This piece is a portable sculpture constructed to hold research and objects generated by the Gathering of Waters project. Made of ponderosa pine floorboards from a demolished Albuquerque church and sealed with piñon pine sap, the sculpture resembles a large, rectilinear backpack, with drawers containing water samples, hydrology reports, logbook, photographs, maps, and a carved wooden book, 'Rio Grande Atlas'.

Other ‘Gathering’ Projects

along the Calaveras River in Stockton, California, Summer 2004
along the Don River, Toronto, Ontario

Documentary

Irland produced a documentary of Gathering of Waters in 1999, which was shown on PBS in America and is distributed by The Film Project: Film for a Safe and Sustainable World.

Other works include

Desert Fountain  1998

Water Library: A Sculptor’s Research into the Phenomenon of Water
an extended meditation on the force of water and the forces surrounding the use and abuse of water resources. 

‘Chapter One’ was presented as an exhibition and catalogue
Inscriptions: Stars, Tides and Ice by the University of New Mexico Art Museum in 2001.
The exhibition included:
Kit for Paddling through Stars Floating on a Lake, 2000
Estuary Drawings, 1999
Of Pelicans and Palapas, 1999
Ice Field, 2000
All work courtesy of the artist and De Leon White Gallery, Toronto and Denver.

Non-potable Aqua 2001

Essays on Irland’s work

Basia Irland, Archivist of Waters, by Kathleen Stewart Howe
Navigating the Currents, David Williams interviews Basia Irland
Connecting, by Basia Irland
www.unm.edu/~basia/BIRLAND/HTML/essays.html

Contact

w : www.unm.edu/~basia/BIRLAND
e : basia at unm.edu

Photo credits

All photographs are of A Gathering of Waters and are provided by and copyright of Basia Irland.

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