Description
Stone and shells. If you peek inside of the large shell, you see a glimpse of blue glass.
This mosaic is about 10″ tall, made of stone and shells on a hand-made concrete substrate. It has hangers attached through the back for mounting on a wall. Years ago, I started occasionally making work in response to climate change. I named the series “Memory of Ice” in reference to melting icebergs, and I used clear and white glass to suggest ice, with some stone. Later, I created this mosaic using mostly stone to represent the cracked earth when and if water becomes scarce in many places. I inset a piece of blue glass under the protruding shell, thinking of the steadily shrinking water table.
Background: We moved out to a rural area, about 30 miles from Olympia, WA, to build a little homestead in 2002. Back then, water flowed freely from our well and salmon spawned in the stream on our property. Within about 10 years, we began running out of water periodically in the summer. Salmon stopped running up our stream. Finally, our well pump failed, and we learned that it burned out due to running dry all the time. Our water table is declining, and even though it rains buckets here in the Pacific NW, we have clay soil and our rain mostly runs off the top layer of earth, into rivers, and out to sea. It doesn’t sink down to refill the water table. Our water has always been replenished by ice building up in the mountains over winter, then melting down to lower levels in spring and summer. But our winters are getting more and more mild, and we don’t get the ice we need most years. We had a large cistern installed, and a new pump that shuts down when the well is dry. So, it is set to very slowly pull water as possible, filling the cistern, and we need to be cautious about our water use in summer. This is a temporary solution.
For people who live in the city, your water just appears and you don’t have to think about where it comes from. But chances are, someone else is grappling with the question of how to keep up with the water supply as the climate changes. I made this mosaic as a reminder; water is life, and we need to think ahead.
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