Returning to Water: Understanding Place as Cultural Lens

Water is Life. For millennia people have returned to lakes, rivers and oceans for inspiration, exchange and rejuvenation. Waters are repositories of memories, stories and teachings. We navigate by water and it marks for us both direction and time. The personality, presence or absence of water shapes the sense of a place. Numerous great works of art, literature, film and poetry have carried water themes. This paper describes a new body of my artwork inspired by a specific lake, how I have combined visual information from various disciplines, and how the work reflects on human relationships with water. The Great Lakes collectively hold a fifth of the world’s fresh water. Currently our fresh waters and our seas are experiencing mounting threats from aquatic and plant invasive species, chemical pollutants and an ever more demanding human population. As an artist, designer and an educator, I often seek to raise awareness of socio-political, cultural, and environmental issues. Cultural identity is rooted in the sense of ‘home’. My own sense of place, my sense of ‘home’ is the Western Great Lakes and particularly Lake Michigan. This body of work examines our vital connections to water and cultural beliefs of ownership and notions about ‘home.’ The work consists of twelve installations and a single-channel video documenting specific locations around Lake Michigan. Multilayered digital prints are the focal points for installation. These utilize photography, cartography and scientific and historical documents to evoke a deeper connection to the Lake and a sense of time. Vials of water, sand, pebbles, rocks?bits of detritus?¬¬and a contoured shelf describing the lakeshore at the location, accompanies each print. The series of twelve represents both a physical journey circumnavigating Lake Michigan and a spiritual journey finding my home.