FDM 3d print from PLA biodegradable filament
3.875 x 3.675 x 4.5 inches, 2024
Edition of 200
You Are The Water is an invitation to attention and contemplation. Consisting of four interlocking parts, this limited edition artist book is intended as an open ended three dimensional puzzle of sorts, to be disassembled and reassembled into a variety of configurations that at once reveal and conceal its individual pieces. Originally created as a study for a public art project called Water Offering, the act of taking something apart and putting it back together in a different way, is a critical part of my design process and it is through such experimentation that Water Offering was created.
Commissioned in 2021 by the New York Department of Cultural Affairs for the Queens Botanical Garden, Water Offering is a performative sculpture project inspired by Egyptian offering tables and Japanese Megaliths. As cultural artifacts, these sculptures are performative objects, activated by the pouring water through the carved channels in the stone. In a similar way, Water Offering allows viewers to directly engage with the art work, pouring water into carved basins and watching it move through channels eventually running over an unfinished rock surface. Made of quarried granite and glacial erratic boulders, these pieces reference both the massive infrastructure built to support the inhabitants of New York City, and the largely invisible system of aquifers and groundwater reservoirs, both of which are used to irrigate the plants in this garden.
You Are The Water consists of three translucent parts and a white enclosure. The form at the center of You Are The Water is a 3D scan of a six thousand pound boulder used in Water Offering. Printed in a single layer of translucent PLA, the piece is light in the hand, implying a fragility and a luminosity at odds with its original referent. Enclosing it are two boxes that hold the central stone like two cupped hands. One side of each box is open, which allows the interior and exterior surface of the rock to be seen at once. The white enclosure functions as a protective envelope for the assembled work and a base for stacking and rearranging the individual pieces.
You Are The Water is an invitation to look, touch and move this translucent representation of a very old and heavy object and to contemplate its physical and material trajectory as it traveled for millions of years in compression underground, to its isolated form as a boulder, to its future as a sculpture in a Botanical Garden in Queens.
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