Watershed Consciousness

2011

Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto ON

Watersheds form paths for the flow of energy across Earth’s surface. All living things are connected through the life-giving waters that they share. This installation asks us to consider our relationship to watersheds in the context of cities and the urban environment.

Watershed Consciousness invites site visitors to orient their sense of place to the city's watershed.

In the work, Toronto’s majestic ravine system is expressed by living wall interrupting steel sheets that interpret the urban pad. To consider this installation as a map is to confront the city's ecological essence.

Within the artwork, information about the urban grid minimized. Copper and brass lacing across the steel surface represent the city's predominant road and rail arteries. Etched into the steel sheets are ghostly lines that track the lost rivers of Toronto - waterways buried long ago by urban development. At the top of the sculpture is a water troft, below which suspends a perforated steel sheet shaped to reflect the Oak Ridge Moraine, which is where the watershed begins. With a century old industrial building behaving as a borrowed backdrop, stainless steel pipes accurately depict the delicate route of tributaries that stretch high above Toronto and into the city. The pipes hover in open space to extenuate the tenuousness of the water table in an ever changing landscape.

In growing seasons, water flows through the installation – traversing down the various steel surfaces and irrigating the plants before being collected in a tray at the base and recirculated back into the sculpture. In this way, the installation is a living work that looks and behaves differently in each season – growing and hibernating, rusting and cleansing, as it responds to the changing conditions of weather and environment.

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