| My sustained interest in water compels me to create visual perceptions of water and water ecology. I cut, fold, stretch, and tie paper, Mylar, tape, and plastic to express ecological issues ranging from the dramatic ecosystem breakdown in the Great Lakes, to the modest, almost overlooked ecological problems of Papillion Creek in Eastern Nebraska. In aspects of water I find a means to build a language of myself and convey my comprehension of things. I was an established realist, figurative painter when a confluence of events in 2002 changed my career. From out of nowhere, in order to participate in a show about rivers, I cut marks and folded shapes in Arches En-Tout-Cas paper to create a large map of the river where I grew up, complete with water swirls, windmills, Adirondack chairs, and pop-up buildings. |  |
Susan Knight
My sustained interest in water compels me to create visual perceptions of water and water ecology. I cut, fold, stretch, and tie paper, Mylar, tape, and plastic to express ecological issues ranging from the dramatic ecosystem breakdown in the Great Lakes, to the modest, almost overlooked ecological problems of Papillion Creek in Eastern Nebraska. In aspects of water I find a means to build a language of myself and convey my comprehension of things.
I was an established realist, figurative painter when a confluence of events in 2002 changed my career. From out of nowhere, in order to participate in a show about rivers, I cut marks and folded shapes in Arches En-Tout-Cas paper to create a large map of the river where I grew up, complete with water swirls, windmills, Adirondack chairs, and pop-up buildings. What I presumed was a one-time-only project grew into a series of cut-paper, narrative drawings which referenced undertow, the lamprey eel invasion, and alewife die-off, stories from my childhood on the Great Lakes. I was drawing from memory and expressing nature for the very first time. There were more surprises. With an X-acto knife in my hand, I felt like Zorro. The physicality of making marks by cutting away invigorated my endeavor. Narrative drawings gave way to abstract drawings, dimensional constructions, and installations. What was true then and remains constant now is that water stories, the ecology of water, and most recently the actual shape of water inspire almost every project.
To scrutinize water’s movement, health, and well being, is by default an examination of our own existence. I believe that it is water’s intrinsic, metaphysical quality that is ultimately responsible for my ecological investigations. Judith Arcana, in her essay, Walking the Lake’s Edge in Winter, expresses it well when she writes,?“Like the water that makes me, the water inside me, moving from lips to heart, cells to systems and back again in tides of myself, so this water, rising from the heart of the continent, surges from Mackinaw City to Toronto. Here was the lesson that teaches how everything changes, how transition is never complete, how whatever we are is whatever we’ve been, whatever we ever will be.”
