WATER: Mystery & Plight

The opening reception on Friday night for WATER: Mystery & Plight at the Sharon Arts Exhibition Gallery far exceeded my wildest dreams of a perfect opening. The place was packed and it seemed like everyone was moved by 13,699 as well as Mary Lang's serene and mysterious photographs (www.marylang.com). The responses to my piece were heartwarming and insightful, pointing to an aspect that I hadn't considered such as using "S" hooks to hang the strings mirrors the tenuous environmental balance that victims of the water crisis are facing. Many commented how thrilled they were to be allowed to enter the installation and get close and be able to touch it.

At the opening, the volunteers who worked on making the installation, breaking it down, packing it up, and setting it back up again, as well as two of Sharon Arts' staff who put in extra effort to make the exhibit a success, were given Innate Gear's very cool stainless steel water bottles as a token of my appreciation. Thanks, again, to Innate Gear for donating such a great product to my cause.

Check out www.innate-gear.com to learn about a photo contest––Hydrate with Innate––where the prize is a $1000. donation to a charitable organization that provides access to safe drinking water! The winner also gets a case of Innate's very cool stainless steel water bottles. You can post photos and stories about hydration on their site and enter this worthy contest. Pass the word to all thirsty shutter bugs.

Show Time

The opening at the Sharon Arts Center Exhibition Gallery is three days from today and thanks to lots of effort from many volunteers, 13,699 is complete and installed! I finished the piece on June 17, uncorked a bottle of Champagne and shared it with some friends, and then on my birthday, the 20th, started to take it all down. It took about 24 work hours over three days to disassemble the lines of bottle caps as each one had to be wrapped around cardboard. The frame and grid were moved and installed on Thursday, the 25th, and on Friday we started to unwrap lines and rehang them in the gallery. We finished yesterday with the fun part of adjusting each bottle cap on its line, and setting the lighting. The gallery space does wonders for 13,699 with a beautiful blue gray wall behind it for contrast and dramatic lighting casting shadows on the floor and the wall. After working on this project for such a long time, it feels unreal for it to be complete and installed.

Innate Gear has made a generous gift of stainless steel water bottles to this project. They will be awarded as prizes at two events that are scheduled during the exhibition. The Harris Center for Conservation Education is sponsoring a film, The Water Front, and discussion night on July 14th and Robert Wood, Water Quality Manager, will make a presentation on July 25th on his work in Guatemala with Water for People. Many thanks to Innate Gear for supporting me in my effort to raise awareness about water conservation.

Exhibition Countdown

The exhibition, WATER: Mystery & Plight, opens at the Sharon Arts Center Exhibition Gallery (www.sharonarts.org) on July 3. 13,699 will be installed and photographs of surfaces of water by Mary Lang will be displayed. Mary's photographs are abstract, contemplative color fields where scale is uncertain. Check them out at www.marylang.com. I'm co-curating this exhibit with Susan Callihan (www.suecallihan.com) and we've been busy taking care of all of the details of putting an exhibition together. The exhibition postcard is printed and at the mail house and the press releases are about to be sent out. Meanwhile, I've been trying to finish 13,699 and it's almost there! I need about 100 more lines to fill in some sparse areas and fortunately friends are showing up to help out with the final push. Once it's complete, however, it all has to come down string by string so that it can be moved to Peterborough. Colleen Clark, video artist, volunteered to film me talking briefly about the installation. Check it out on changents.com. There was another String-A-Thon at Harlow's Pub, which was successful. On May 16 I participated in Children in the Arts Festival in Peterborough, NH by setting up at the Sharon Arts Center Gallery for drilling and stringing. There was a steady stream of children and adults who helped out. The Starving Artist in Keene, NH invited me to do a presentation and have a stringing session in May. After working on 13,699 for such a long time, I'm very excited about displaying it in public. The opening is July 3rd from 5:00 to 7:00 and the exhibition will be up through August 2nd.

Busy Times & Good News

The past six weeks have been a blur of activity. I made a presentation to 7th graders at the Salem Academy Charter School in Salem, MA. This group was considerably younger than all of the others that I've worked with, but they hung in there. The first String-A-Thon at our local pub, Harlow's, was a huge success and will be repeated on Tuesday, May 12. Eleven people showed up to string bottle caps and drink beer. They managed to string 114 lines! Two weeks ago I did two presentations at New England College in Henniker, NH and the Art Club kept all of my equipment for the week so that they could drill bottle caps and string them. Their efforts culminated at NEC's Earth Day Festival. St. Paul's School had an Earth Day Festival as well and thanks to inclement weather, more students showed up to my presentation and managed to string almost 200 lines. I made a presentation about raising water awareness in NH schools at a Department of Environmental Services' Drinking Water Source Protection Workshop last Friday. I was given a display table where I had a bowl of bottle caps and many participants stopped to ask what they were all about. It was fun to talk to water professionals and environmentalists about the project, which certainly was unique at this extremely technical workshop. My friend, Randi, came up from Boston for the weekend to help me hang all of the strings that had been piling up. We made a major dent in the pile and as a result, the installation is coming together beautifully. Yesterday I received a grant award from the Anne Slade Frey Charitable Trust of Hanover, NH, for which I am very grateful.

Art for Water: Walk for Water in Portland, Maine

Sunday was World Water Day and and in Portland, Maine SOH20, Food and Water Watch, Maine Water Allies, and Take Back the Tap organized a Walk for Water followed by a celebration at the North Star Cafe. The weather was warm and sunny one minute and freezing, snowy, and windy the next, but there was quite a crowd gathered to walk 4 miles, which represents a common distance that people have to walk in order to get water for their homes and families. There were huge puppets, The Leftist Marching Band of Portsmouth, NH, dogs, children, and citizens of all ages concerned about global water issues and water privatization issues close to home. After the walk, everyone congregated at the North Star Cafe on Congress Street to hear from the sponsors, The Leftist Marching Band, poets, and yours truly giving a presentation about my installation project. It was pretty exciting to spend the better part of the day with so many people who are active in trying to protect water resources in Maine.

Art for Water: World Water Day

Amy Dowley, the Maine Organizer for Food & Water Watch, has invited me to attend a World Water Day celebration in Portland on Sunday and to give a presentation about 13,699. This is a much appreciated invitation after trying to make something happen in Concord, NH for World Water Day and not succeeding. I had hoped, back in September, to set up the installation, actually unveil it (in process), in front of the State House. After the piece started to come together, however, I realized that this was unrealistic unless I could rent a tent for a whole week, which I could not afford to do. Plan B was to set up a small table and a very scaled down version in the Visitor Center inside the State House, but the powers that be did not think that this was a good idea. Plan C was to acquire the use of an empty storefront on Main Street for a week and set up the installation in process, but the owner would not agree to it. So, I was feeling kind of all dressed up with no place to go when Amy's invitation appeared. There'll be a Walk for Water, which starts behind the Hannaford parking lot, followed by a gathering at the North Star Cafe on Congress Street.

Art for Water: At the Mill

Have just spent three days at the Cheshire Mill studio space where 13,699 is being constructed, rehanging lines of bottle caps. Originally, I had hoped that the bottle caps on monofilament could be hung on a metal grid that would suspend from the ceiling. However, the exhibition venue for the fall required a free-standing frame. I had gotten an estimate from a metal fabricator to make the frame of my dreams, (sleek, anodized white . . .) but the price was way out of my range at $3000. So, galvanized steel pipe with fence fittings at the corners that I bought from FarmTek (a very cool catalog) will have to do. This is my first three-dimensional project, so thinking in volume and depth is more challenging than I had imagined. The frame that I ordered was ten feet high and ten feet square and I intended to put a twelve by twelve foot grid on the top. Once that was erected, however, I realized the scale was way off and it was just too big. So, with the help of some friends who happen to be sculptors, Kim and Scott Cunningham, my husband and I took the frame apart and Scott and Noel cut down the pipes with a chop saw and then we put the frame all together again. Jeremy from Bevara suggested grid wall, which is typically used in retail shops, for the top grid and I found some at two by five foot rectangles. Noel and I assembled them and secured them with hose clamps. The grids hang over the frame by about one foot all the way around.

Last August Noel and I had suspended some metal shelving from the ceiling with chains, so there were about 250 lines hanging that had to be taken down when I got the steel frame. Each line had to be wrapped around a scrap of foam core or hung from poles on the studio walls. I had been collecting more strung lines from my work with students. Over the past three days I hung or rehung about 350 lines, trying to figure out how to space them. Currently there are more than 7,000 bottle caps hanging and only about 25% of the grid is filled. My math skills are proving to be less impressive than I feared because according to my earlier calculations, 7,000 bottle caps should have taken up about 50% of the space. Fearing a shortage yesterday I counted how many caps I have waiting to be drilled and strung and I think I have plenty to complete the project. Although, the installation title refers to how many people die every day from lack of access to clean water, the actual number of bottle caps in the installation will exceed 13,699.

With painting and print making I'm accustomed to a more experimental approach. At the outset of a new body of work, I have an idea of what I want to make, and then work towards that general direction. Along the way there are always happy accidents, especially in print making, and the work evolves as a result. With this installation project I've had to try to think it all the way through on paper and even though I sought out the advice of architect friend, Rick Monahon, the way it looks and they way I thought it would look are different. This was especially shocking with the original ten foot frame. There has been a happy accident, however, and that is that the bottle caps look like a heavy rain falling or the bubbles from a scuba tank or in a water cooler. In spite of being plastic trash, they are beautiful.