Living Water (2022)
A collaborative artwork and site specific installation with Claudia O’Steen.

Living Water is a collaborative, site-specific installation at Maajaam Farm for Art and Tech, Estonia.  The Estonian bog landscape offers an enigmatic zone for exploration; it is a territory where the register between remote sensing data and ground truth is unusually slippery.

We approach the river, the riverbank, and bog in search of boundaries, edges and ecotones in order to interrogate contemporary notions of observation and inference. A floating observation station is positioned at this boundary - where habitats combine, the shifting periphery between water and shoreline mark sites of transformation that are difficult to capture because they are subject to constant change.

The sculptural observation station carefully considers the fragility of the environment in which it is placed, recognizing that peat restoration in bogs is key to Estonia’s climate action plan. The station uses scientific observational tools and methodologies such as a secchi disk, cyanometer, and a Forel Ule Scale in order to document the shifting ecotone.