Seeing Spirit in A Fading Landscape

*Excerpts from exhibition panels & photobook

Water is the womb in which we are born, and the grave to which we descend. We are high tide, shaped in water, born moist; a baby is seventy-five percent water. The 100 trillion cells in our bodies are full of water, slowly drying over our lifetime. Blood is a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms.

The watery portion of blood, the plasma, almost mirrors the concentration of salt and other ions to seawater. Water is our lifeblood, but we know less about the ocean than outer space. We have forgotten we are water’s bidding, a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers (Loren Eiseley). Bruce Lee reminds us, “Be Water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend”

The only substance on the planet to exist in three states: liquid, solid, and gaseous, water is everywhere, perpetually in motion. Water has memory, and like humans holds onto trauma, and can even die. And yet as it transitions between states it has the ability to heal itself, in much the same way blood dies and replenishes. Except when, like humans, pollutants, poisons, or disease are introduced.

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*Each of the images in the gallery are available for purchase as prints and framed