Michelle Boyle is an artist living and working in the lake-filled landscape of Cavan, Ireland with a developing base in India where her birth father was from. She works in painting and drawing, more recently using video, installation and the written word as part of her creative practice.
Michelle swims year-round in her local lake and this immersive experience has led to her to consider the living agency of fresh water in the landscape and to ask
‘What water would say if it could speak to us?’
As a water scientist and protector, Dr. Kelsey Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policy-making.
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Her work focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings for our shared sustainable future. Dr. Leonard represents the Shinnecock Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America’s ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning, and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for sustainable water and ocean governance. Read More
My work focuses on climate and water. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I would have said climate change is the existential issue of our time. Today I would recast that more broadly—climate change, environmental damage, pollution, profligate overuse of resources, as well as viral outbreaks, are all related to issues of poor human stewardship of our interconnected planet. The connection between environmental issues, environmental justice and the pandemic’s disproportionate effects on the poor and people of color is undeniable. As an artist, I bear witness to what we are losing and imagine ways to mitigate the losses creatively, lovingly and honestly. Read More
Many say that I am obsessed with water. I say, how can I not be? I live in the desert. I need water to survive. Water is a scarce natural resource that plays a critical role in the destiny of humanity and all flora and fauna. Water is beautiful, refreshing, and miraculous. We consume water to sustain our lives and immerse ourselves in water to cleanse our body and soul and awaken our spirit. Pure water is the universal solvent, yet polluted water is the carrier of disease and death. Water quality and scarcity have been a central focus of my work for more than three decades. Typical to my art practice and process, works evolve through in-depth research, personal experiences and my intimate interdependent relationship with nature.
Water is central to life on earth. As Da Vinci said, water is “the earth’s blood.” As a naturalist and painter, I have been painting birth, growth, decay, death and renewal in nature for three decades and find myself drawn to the edges of swamps, ponds, rivers and oceans. I look to water to tell me about the many changes in the environment. water is always changing. As water changes, it changes its environment whether through erosion, flooding, nutrition, or drought. And what we as humans do upstream, will, through the water, affect what happens downstream.
ig: @ilana_manolson
Susan Hoffman Fishman is a mixed-media painter, eco-artist and arts writer whose work addresses water in the context of the climate crisis. She is especially fascinated by the contrast between the horrifying destruction happening to our bodies of water and the magnificent beauty of that destruction. Her recent paintings and installations recast ancient myths – in which water plays a pivotal role – into visual narratives that reflect upon contemporary society.
In 2021, Fishman’s desire to collaborate with scientists on the effects of the climate crisis on water sources led her to participate in a three-month artist residency at Planet Labs, an international company based in San Francisco, CA that provides daily global satellite images. There, she worked with a Planet geologist and studied the thousands of sinkholes developing in recent years around the Dead Sea in Israel and Jordan, in Siberia and in other countries around the world. Fishman continues to interpret scientific data about this growing environmental crisis through an artist’s lens.
Ecology serves as the conceptual framework of my investigation and maps provide the visual language for my expression. I make prints, drawings, and sculptures that use watersheds as symbols of interconnectedness.
My process leads me into the landscape in multiple ways: walking into the woods and along stream banks awakens an immediate, sensory experience of place; composing images with spatial data provides an expansive and analytical geographic perspective; repetitive mark making opens a meditative path that offers insights gained through time spent with sustained focus. Together, these practices define my creative exploration about how we understand and imagine ourselves in relationship to the natural world.
My focus has been on intersections of nature and culture in places where my country has been at war: Los Alamos, Vietnam, Iraq. For the past 10 years I’ve added an environmental water remediation project in the Mesopotamian Marshes, hoping to leave something constructive behind rather than to just take away photographs from which to make these artworks. Here I originated the idea, and have led a team, to build a wastewater garden, a public art and cultural heritage site, that will provide clean water, health, and beauty to a magnificent, ancient and distressed culture. See: www.edeniniraq.com.
Baja California Sur (BCS) is the driest state in Mexico and dependent on rainfall. Locally, it is said that the water does not come from the faucet, it comes from the mountain. Eighty percent of BCS rainwater evaporates, five percent is, run off, to the arroyos and only the remaining fifteen percent seeps into the ground to infiltrate and recharge its aquifers. Forty seven percent of Mexicans do not have consistent access to drinking water even though access to water for personnel and domestic use is a right guaranteed in Article 4 of the Mexican constitution.
I love to witness how trees dance with water, how they increase the hydrological capacity of place, how they fashion their forms and structures after water’s flow patterns. Some trees even make their own rain, building perfectly engineered leaves that condense the water in the air. So much of the beauty and wonder of trees is an expression of this ancient and sacred relationship, one that provides endless artistic inspiration.
Adam Wolpert
www.adamwolpert.com