Watershed Cairns Reflections      Libby Reuter         October, 28,2022     

On October 21, 2022, Joshua Rowan and I placed a four-foot-tall glass sculpture on a bluff in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, overlooking the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to become the Ohio River. This was the culmination of our Watershed Cairns art and environmental advocacy project. For more than eleven years, we have been photographing a series of temporary, stacked glass cairns at sites in the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri Watershed.

As the project concludes, I have had an opportunity to reflect on the question we are often asked by others and that we have asked ourselves. What is it? and Why?

For Watershed Cairns, art is a verb, like see, think, or make. Art is not a “thing.” To art is to use sounds, movement, or materials to alter the artist’s, and then the audience’s, perception of the world. Josh and I started in the St. Louis metro thinking we would make cool pictures using light glass sculptures in the landscape because glass’ reflective qualities were similar to those of water. Slowly we learned by making the images and by listening to water stakeholders that our mission was to make images that transform the way we see and understand freshwater.

You may have had the experience of leaving a concert, movie, or exhibition and noticing something quite common that you hadn’t paid attention to before now seems extraordinary. Sometimes, that heightened awareness fades quickly, and a tree is just a tree, but it can also initiate reexamining our assumptions. Watershed Cairn images prompt viewers to see water as an integral part of our lives and to question the limits of thinking about our land and water as commodities. We believe that establishing a different relation with nature is a prime condition to acquire the necessary attitudes and skills to combat global warming and biodiversity loss. Powerful images can engage viewers’ emotions and intellect.

Visual representations of water matter. As an example, the lecture notes of painter and teacher Paul Klee (1879–1940) illustrate how visual images can subtly reorient our perception. His illustration of the water cycle has two components. In one, a large “x” divides the circle into four parts while placing the viewer in the center of the cycle. In his second sketch, a slinky-like spiral depicts the cycle’s repetition, expanding the common single circle depiction. Klee’s conceptualization differs from the more familiar representation that distances the observer by placing them outside the picture of a simplified landscape clouds, to rain, to surface and groundwater, and evaporation. The different graphic representations lead to different understandings.

Landscape architect Dilip da Cuna cites Klee’s sketch in his book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. Da Cuna theorizes that prior to the arrival of the British, people in India used the word “Ganga,” to describe the whole of their watery environment: rain, marshes, seasonal river flow and changing course, as well as cycles of flood and drought. When the British arrived, they drafted maps representing India’s main river as a fixed line and called it the “Ganges.” In effect, the colonists’ act of moving a pen across paper reduced a complex, four-dimensional world, where human and nonhuman entities interacted, into a two-dimensional space that certain humans could control.

Watershed Cairns’ objective is to encourage people to experience rivers as more than a thin blue line on a map. With exhibits of images, maps, and text, we invite people to envision themselves enveloped in water’s web —at a site that is resonant with hidden history, overlooked biodiversity, an undertow of politics, and often-unseen ecological risks from infrastructure and technologies.

Arting to Reenchant

Watershed Cairns’ photographs of glass cairn sculptures—unexpected and luminous—temporarily appearing in a three-dimensional landscape are purposefully mysterious. In these images, the cairns, inspired by the beautiful glass and precious metals of religious reliquaries, are transformative vessels in their own right. Rather than containing a saint’s relic as an intermediary to the holy one, the repurposed glass cairns are stand-ins for the viewer whose own body is more than 50 percent water. In each photo, the cairn focuses viewers’ attention on the sacred water, land, and air surrounding the glass vessel. Contemporary art historian Illa Sheren suggests that the light (in the cairn) Imbues the glass with an inner vitality and renders the cairn neither human nor nonhuman, but an enchanted in-between. She references political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett’s idea of enchantment “strengthening the moral compact between humans and the nonhuman world that surrounds them” and “enacts the possibility of change.”

Arting to Inform

The lack of watershed understanding leads to imprudent water management, poorly planned development, and ill-advised draining of essential wetlands. Many people don’t know what a watershed is or that they live in one. At a basic level, naming the project Watershed Cairns introduces the word to the vocabulary of people who may not be ecologically minded. When people see the photographs, the incongruity of fragile glass glowing in natural, industrial, or urban landscapes arouses viewers’ curiosity and connection. They comment on the image’s beauty and express concern for the fragile glass. The most frequently asked question is, “Do you leave them there?” In exhibits, people approach us to tell their stories of similar places that are important to them.

Visions of Flow and Node

Flow

A Google Earth™ map, showing more than four-hundred locations where cairn images were created, provides a visual description of the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri Watershed. This watershed provides drinking water and irrigation to 41 percent of the continental United States. What humans do on this land and to the rivers makes a difference in the quality of that water. Watershed Cairns’ challenge is to encourage people to notice water—in rivers, ditches, swamps, and in the puddle at the end of their street—and to know that it is interconnected with the planetary and atmospheric cycle of water.

Node

Like the yellow pins on a Google Earth™ map, a cairn functions as a flag in the image, indicating that this landscape, or junkyard, or swamp is significant. Because the fragile glass seems out of place, we are compelled to slow down and pay attention. The cairn marks a node or entry point to the history, ecology, technologies, and politics specific to that place. To support the viewer’s curiosity about what makes this place worth noting, a brief paragraph drawing attention to some aspect of the location accompanies each image on the watershedcairns.com website and in exhibits.

The visual and textual information from all these freshwater nodes invite further investigation and combine to tell a part of the larger watershed story. However, some of the information you might experience at the site is missing in the image. What did that place smell like?  How dry or humid did it feel? Was the ground firm or spongy? What is this place like at night or daytime, in the rain or winter, in drought, or flood? To enable viewers/readers to experience the four-dimensional “Ganga” of that exact place and to observe changes to the site over time, each image is identified on the web and in exhibits by its street address and its latitude and longitude.

We agree with National Geographic photographers Helle and Uri Løvevild Golman’s Project Wild slogan “what you love, you will protect.” Watershed Cairns has been creating images that celebrate water in the “tame” places where we live. Our mission is to help people to fall in love with and protect water. Here. Now.

I think Natalie Diaz is speaking for water in this excerpt from her poem “Exhibits from the American Water Museum’.

You have been made in my likeness.

I am inside you—I am you/or you are me.

Let us say to one another: I am yours—

And know finally that we will only ever be

as much as we are willing to save of one another.

Works Consulted

Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins

Ila N. Sheren, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis

This book will be published in early 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan, in a lifetime print run and in an electronic book edition.

The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent

Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

Dilip da Cunha

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2018

“Exhibits from The American Water Museum” in Postcolonial Love Poem

Natalie Diaz

Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020

Paul Klee, “The Water Cycle,” in Paul Klee Notebooks, Vol.2: The Nature of Nature

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York,2017

Water, Oil, and Fish (node concept)

Daniel MacFarlane and Lynn Heasley, in City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, Eds. Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating, and William C. Barnett

Pittsburgh Hist. Urban Environment Series

University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2020

1,310 words /excluding works cited