Susan Shantz
figure 6 : Redacted map of three prairie provinces with the connected dots and lines of roads and towns painted white to reveal the Saskatchewan River watershed from the Rocky Mountains to the Saskatchewan River Delta. Finding Watershed (redacted prairie maps) , white paint on found paper maps, 129.0 x 89.0 cm (detail), 2022
A number of pieces in Confluence began as small-scale tracings from conventional maps, as I sought the path of water, using pen, paint and thread. Scaled up, these became large installations: the blue ballpoint ink lines of water lines hidden amidst the roads and towns of three prairie highway maps were increased, inches to feet, and cut into azure-blue tarps hung overhead to cast shadow-maps below (figures 2 and 2a) ; the accordion-fold bookwork of the river meandering through the soft topography of badlands expanded to eight stitched fabric panels cascading down the wall of the gallery and across the floor (figures 3 and 4) . In another series, I embroidered the path of water in three key watershed zones onto the back of white-collar shirts for water managers. If we wore the river, like a ritual garment connected physically and imaginatively to our bodies (figure 5) , might we make different decisions about the upstream and downstream waters that connect us -- humans and more-than-human beings – in our watersheds?
After completing and exhibiting the Confluence installation, I returned to my map-source and, with white paint and a fine-pointed brush, covered over the grid-lines and dots of roads and towns to better see the connecting paths of rivers as well as the loose outline of the watershed that holds them. This hydrocommons, beneath the ghost- marks of civilisation (figure 6) , is a threshold edge, opening to the white ground of the map itself and revealing a permeable space. Like the water’s shoreline on a river or lake, it is a more complex zone of transition than John Wesley Powell might have imagined with his demarcated governance boundaries.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: complex systems
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