July 23, 2022
We’ve refined our ideas. Making the artwork and talking it through, we decided to revise our artist’s statement. Here is our most recent thinking on the project.
The Ipswich River Watershed Project:
Drawing on the River
In this artwork, green panels represent the Ipswich River, its headwaters and tributaries (like the Miles River here at the NE Biolabs campus). The blue panels represent the rising and receding tides of the Atlantic Ocean. Between them a lighter browner area represents the exposed riverbed below the Ipswich Mills Dam revealed when the river runs dry due to overdrawing and droughts like the one we are experiencing this summer.
The primary metaphor in this artwork is intention.
If a functioning watershed can be said to have “intentions”, those might be to sustain many forms of life. A municipal water system might “intend” to serve human needs including irrigation, sewer systems, drinking water, drainage and transportation.
Extending this metaphor, we considered the intentions of individual actors in the watershed. A spawning alewife intends to leave the ocean and journey into the fresh river water. A dam might intend to contain and force the water through a faster channel. The dam also has unintended consequences, it prevents the spawning alewife from migrating upriver. It slows the water and alters its temperature.
These intentions are out of balance when one system impedes the desires of the other. When a river frequently dries up due to overdrawing the water, the unintended consequences impact all of the stakeholders.
The life-sustaining natural system, and the system that serves human intentions depend upon our good stewardship so that both may flourish.
Caroline and John Rufo
www.rufoart.net
A River is a Love Story
July 23, 2022
We are collaborating on an installation for New England Biolabs in Ipswich, MA. The piece will be on view for the months of September and October, 2022. Because of the nature of the work being done at the lab and the pandemic, we will not be having an opening reception or other public events. Curators and other interested folks can contact us to request a private showing.
Each human intervention in the watershed can be imagined to have intention. The way a pen wants to write, or a hammer sees only nails, a dam might seek to “hold, slow, warm, and contain”, while a storm drain might “direct, drain, accelerate, and pollute”. We think about the river as a conversation between all the entities in the watershed. This idea of conversation came to us after reading a TS Eliot poem, “The Dry Salvages”, which was written in part about the Cape Ann area:
“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget…”
It isn’t our intent to superimpose a deity or even a gender on the river. But we do see a lyrical interaction. With this artwork, we are exploring a metaphorical conversation that is going on between the watershed, the sea, and the human interventions in the system. The river reaches for the sea, but overdrawing of the water results in a dry riverbed every summer. The sea rises to greet the river, but dams prevent spawning fish and eels from returning to their breeding grounds. This reaching and failing to connect, mimics the form of a love story. It is up to us to decide whether the story is a romance, or a tragedy.
John:
Bodies of water have always been present as a subject in my work. Vessels that move on the water or carry liquids are also a recurring theme and motif. For me, delineating rivers, lakes, bays, etc. tends to be about observing edges and acknowledging their temporal nature and shared systems with the land or other adjoining waters.
Drawn to the harder features of these evolving bodies - dams, embankments, buildings - in contrast to the organic line of river topography, we are curious about what can’t be seen below the surface. What is the hidden system? How far does it go?
I often begin a project by asking, ‘What’s going on here that’s not obvious or visible?’ I love to dig into history, and in this case, to learn a bit about the engineering and environmental factors that shape the outcomes we see today.
During the research I did for “Intervisible”, I became curious about mills and rivers. After the cotton industry in New England collapsed, the dams were left on the rivers. While they’re no longer functional, they continue to disrupt river and watershed ecosystems. The wet loose color, and more carefully composed patterns reflect the natural processes and unintended consequences at work in the watershed.
Ipswich Mill Dam. April 2, 2022.
Ipswich Mill Dam. July 2, 2022.
Because of excessive water withdrawals, each summer the Ipswich River runs dry. This ecological disruption causes fish kills, and as the shallow water warms up, it becomes susceptible to algae blooms. The Ipswich River has been named one of America’s top ten most endangered rivers by American Rivers.