Water is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, able to sculpt rock and rearrange shorelines. It is also the gentlest of elements, cradling our bodies as we float on its surface, cooling and reviving us as we drink or bathe. We are made of water; human societies could not have coalesced without a source of water. It is both cosmic clock, registering the cyclic pull of moon and planets, and broad liquid highway. Shorelines and river courses are our landmarks and boundaries, yet the ceaseless action of waves, tides, and flowing water erases the marks of our passage. For environmental philosopher Gary Snyder, water writes the ultimate divisions and regions of our planet:

The surface [of the earth] is carved into watersheds -- a kind of familial branching, a chart of relationships, and a definition of place. The watershed is the first and the last nation whose boundaries, though subtly shifting, are unarguable...For the watershed, cities and dams are ephemeral and of no more account than a boulder that falls in the river or a landslide that temporarily alters the channel. The water will always be there and it will always find its way down.

For the past twenty years, water has exerted its powerful and seductive force on Basia Irland. Her sculpture, and the accompanying photographic and video documentation, is an extended investigation of and hymn to water. As her work acknowledges all of the manifestations of water, it engages critical issues surrounding the use and abuse of water sources throughout the world. Irland is an artist working at the intersection of environmental issues, governmental policy, human rights, and natural science, always informed by an awareness of the spiritual dimensions of water.

The sculptures in this exhibition explore watery markings: the ways in which water inscribes its presence, and the ways in which people attempt to diagram and understand its movements. In most cases the objects were made on-site with local materials. They all acknowledge the specificity of that incarnation of water, whether it be in the waves of a tropical sea or locked up in the mass of a glacier. Recurring motifs in this series are the book, the map, and the chart -- elements of our attempt to plot the location and trajectory of this important resource and to locate ourselves in the cosmos. Irland juxtaposes the human impulse to chart -- whether U.S. Geological Survey maps, aerial photographs, or archeoastronomy drawing from ancient cultures -- with the power of water to inscribe itself on the rocks beneath a glacier or in the marks of the tide.

Water is constantly moving, either flowing through the land it shapes or transmuting from one state to another -- liquid, solid, vapor. As it moves through the landscape, water carries our cultures and languages, as well as our garbage. The earliest highways beckoning explorers and traders were rivers and channels between islands. Great expanses of water were barriers to movement that ancient humans navigated by charting the position of celestial bodies, the tools of archeoastronomy.

The journey is a central preoccupation in Irland's work. It is in the course of her own journeys that she makes art that plots the mysteries of water. It is for the journeyer that she crafts her sculptures. They are constructed to contain necessities for travel and to become repositories for the record of the trip -- the maps, charts, photographs, books, and videos. Kit for Paddling through Stars Floating on a Lake folds into a case that is wheeled to the edge of the lake. Once there, it opens, the carved, linden wood paddles come out for assembly, maps and aerial photographs may be consulted, and the voyager puts in to the water. This piece was constructed so that the traveler could paddle to a floating observatory where the infinite text of stars and constellations speaks of direction and limitless space. While canoeing across the surface of the lake the the observatory, he/she paddles across the reflection of the celestial map. The way is at once, in Margaret Atwood's words, "clear and obscure".

The intimate connection between sculpture and the body, the traveler's gear and the culture of his/her watershed, is most pronounced in Of Pelicans and Palapas. It is carried with a tumpline across the forehead in the same way that generations of people in the region have carried their burdens. Estuary Drawings is a hexagonal toolbox for a trip along the ever-changing margins of estuaries and deltas. Along the way, the artist stopped to inscribe archeoastronomy charts in the sand, charts that the waves smoothed away. The photograph and the video are the record of this interchange between the impulse to diagram and the resistance of water to the confines of the chart.

Irland's work also inscribes her long engagement with the book, the map, and the library. No serious journeyer/explorer sets out to follow a river or a shoreline without a logbook. From notations in the logbook one could translate the bends of a river, the fall of the land, the contours of the shore into lines on a map. Ancient travelers plotted their way by stars, moon, and sun, and left the record of their charts inscribed on rock faces. Irland's mapping of our intricate relations with water is translated into "books" that become part of her sculptor's Library of Waters. The book in Estuary Drawings is written in salmon bones embedded in pages formed from the soil of the estuary. A box of birch bark pages accompanies Kit for Paddling through Stars Floating on a Lake. The curving slabs of bark are perforated with striations from the tree's growth cycles and the action of wind, animals, and insects on its bark. The books for Ice Fields are the most ancient texts, their lines scraped into rocks by the frozen weight of the Athabascan Glacier are formed by calcified water bubbles trapped in the matrix of stones cast up on the shore of Lake Superior. These are books that would be at home in Jorge Luis Borge's The Library of Babel, which he described as limitless, periodic, and containing in myriad languages nothing less than the entire universe. Irland herself resembles Borge's librarian, a traveler, constantly searching the books of the great library, trying to decipher meaning from texts written with "organic letters...exact, delicate, intense."

-- KATHLEEN STEWART HOWE