An interview with Basia Irland

by David Williams
Bath, England, April 2001

David Williams: Almost all of your work is concerned with water in one way or another: water as focus for a critical engagement with environmental and cultural issues, water as protean event, navigatory flow, material imagination: water as singularity and multiplicity. The work you're exhibiting here in Bath, Non-potable Agua, focuses on water as medium or carrier, in this instance of micro-pathenogens. You've printed magnified images of cells, giardia lamblia and escherichia coli, to produce a blurring of micro and macro; the fact that they look like planetary bodies serves to highlight the terrible beauty of these organisms.

Basia Irland: Once the organisms were enlarged, I very purposefully wanted them to be beautiful. I'm usually attracted to things that are marked and weathered, muddied, things that have a toughness and grottiness to them - objects that have a kind of life story. But these had to be alluring for the very reason you allude to: the dichotomy of a 'terrible beauty'. For the tragic reality is that such water-borne diseases cause the death of a child, somewhere in the world every eight minutes.
While I was in Indonesia I contracted giardia. On one of the scrolls in the exhibition here in Bath is an image of a skin sample cross section infected with giardia lamblia, which appears to be an aerial view of a green fertile field. Other scrolls contain one large image of an individual Giardia parasite. The scroll is another form of book. These can be displayed on the wall or rolled up, put into clear tubes and carried over your shoulder.

On another scroll what looks like a planet with its orange moon is actually Escherichia Coli. Several years ago, the inhabitants of Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, turned on their kitchen faucets to get a drink, just the way millions of people do every day. But seven people died and hundreds were hospitalized because e-coli from a nearby feed lot had seeped into the city's drinking water supply.
Since the 1970's, visitors and residents of Bath have been prohibited from soaking in the ancient Roman Baths after one bather died from amoebic meningic encephalitis. The 'Bath Bug' is naegleria fowleri and is found around the world in natural hot springs. Vibrio cholerae, legionella, plesiomonas shigelloides and acinetobacter baumanii are a few of the tongue-twistingly named water-borne infections which will eventually find their way onto a scroll, their beautiful, colorful images belying their deadly nature.

And you're right, I'm captivated by the relations between micro and macro. When you're flying over a river delta, you can see all those dentritic patterns that are formed by water flow. This connects with tree patterns, blood vessels and circulatory systems, synaptic activity, the branchings and connections in our brains ...

DW: These homologies recur in your work. As do marks, lines, graphic traces left by water in its various manifestations. In a recent catalogue, you write about diagrams you made on a beach, pre-Keplerian archaeoastronomical mappings of the tug of planetary bodies on terrestrial bodies of water, with the rhythmic lap of waves gradually effecting an erasure. And you go on to describe scars on a whale's back, and the impact of a glacier's movement on rock surfaces. You seem to celebrate giving over 'authorship' to elements and natural processes, or at least a desire to collaborate with them.

BI: As a conceptually-based artist, I'm concerned with the processes of making work. I'm interested in all the different processes that go on daily in nature. In British Columbia, on the Athabascan Glacier, what engaged me was the way the glacier moves across the land leaving behind inscriptions, signatures, an eternal language of long-term processes. As the ice shifts pebbles mark the rock beneath it.

My most recent museum show was entitled Inscriptions: Stars, Tides and Ice. And a large, smooth stone I brought back from the glacier with dozens of lines etched into its surface was included in the exhibition. Both glaciers and artists inscribe, we make marks. When you're out in the desert, you see plants that have been blown back and forth by the wind, and they make little fan-shaped patterns in the sand. When water laps up onto shore, it makes marks. These processes relate to time, they take time and occur through time.

DW: Your work seems to encourage a quality of patient attention a little like the Renaissance 'festina lente': make haste slowly. In this way it resists certain contemporary commodity culture rhythms, proposing a realignment with the rhythms of organic processes, a deceleration into taking or making time ...

BI: Well, the Gathering of Waters project, which I'll discuss later, took almost five years, and it's still continuing. I hope it will just keep on going at its own pace. Each piece I do develops over time, due to the research phase, travelling to places to gather natural materials, working with and learning from local residents, and detailed construction of each work.

DW: It's evident you have a fascination for boats, connected to your interests in water and journeys. The boats you've made are somewhat anthropomorphic, structurally reminiscent of ribcages, and they interpenetrate human and animal in both form and materials.

BI: Ilove canoeing. My son grew up in a canoe on northern Ontario lakes. There's something very serene about being out on the water of a lake; rivers can be little less predictable, I've capsized several times and it can be scary. I enjoy the physicality and practicality of travelling by means of self-propulsion on water in this way. It's a kind of swimming.

Some of my sculptural boats were indeed anthropomorphised or had animal aspects. Some had fish tails, a lot of them had wings. I like the image of a winged boat. In some cultures, boats are the carriers of the soul, just as the crescent moon was seen as a boat form of similar function. The vikings buried their dead in rock formations in the shape of a boat. And I'm also drawn to paddles, sculpturally, and their relationship with the human body. The shape of a boat is often, though not always, a mandorla: the intersection of two circles. It's the vaginal form, an eye shape. Several of my portable pieces open up to make this shape.

DW: Additional ambiguities come from the fact that your boats often float in the air. They are present and absent, line drawings of vessels that may have been there once or are yet to come. They are both gravity-bound and airborne. For me, they are reveries, invitations to travel connecting up with all sorts of notions of journeying...

BI: When I originally made the suspended boat pieces in Canada, they were bent willow covered with light-emitting diodes; in a darkened environment, as an artist I was creating my own constellations. In a Santa Fe exhibition, I suspended forty boats, made from welded black wire, covered with salt crystals, in an open atrium area three floors high. In the low light, shadows were cast by the boats.

DW: Salt has recurred in your work in different ways, and I know it has a diverse set of associations for you. In an essay in which he talks metaphorically of salt as 'felt experience', the crystalline savour of lived experience, James Hillman quotes from an alchemical treatise The Golden Tract: "He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies". In alchemy salt is related to body, and it shares the same symbol as water, as I understand it ...

BI: Yes, I've used the alchemical symbol for salt in my work, it's a circle with a horizontal line through it. My interest in salt works at a number of levels. First of all, the practical: I like working with it as a material -- white on white on white. I like the physical properties of salt. I did a series of pieces where I carved salt licks. In one of them, I carved into the salt lick and embedded in the niche salt crystals that had grown in the sacred lake at Zuni, given to me by a geologist.

My engagement in salt as a marine evaporate grew out of my research into water. I had a Fullbright in Indonesia, and spent quite a bit of time in Bali and Java; in Bali they farm the salt from the beaches.
Salt is used in almost every culture in diverse ways. In Japan, for example, Sumo wrestlers scatter salt before their bouts. The history of salt is alluring - the ways in which it's been traded at various times ounce for ounce for gold. Gandhi's salt march in 1930 was a plea for independence and non-violence in the context of colonialisation. I'd like to go to the Rumanian underground salt caves where salt has been mined for years. Sculptors began working down there and carved elaborate statues and even chandeliers out of salt. Then it was discovered that the miners rarely contracted tuberculosis. The salt takes moisture out of the air. Now they've opened one area of the mine as a hospital - hospital beds in a salt mine is an amazing image.

DW: Like water, salt is ambiguous as a material, both health-giving and highly toxic in certain contexts. A lot of the materials you use operate poetically in this way, exfoliating multiple and ambiguous associations ...

BI: Which is why I use them.

DW: And the materials you use are often imbricated in organic or entropic processes ...

BI: I don't believe there is really any such thing as a static object. Everything, our bodies, that chair over there, an orchid, a piece of steel, is changing and decaying at various rates of speed.

As much as possible I like using materials from the site where I'm working, because they speak of that site. The rucksack that I made for The Gathering of Waters was constructed of wood from an old church in Albuquerque that was torn down; then I covered it with layers of pinon pine sap, so it's aromatic, it smells of the forest.

DW: A lot of your work registers different actions and interventions of your own, and gives itself over to contexts and processes outside of your control; and at the same time it seems to encourage a kind of active embodied receptivity.

BI: Yes. And as I've suggested all of my work is concerned with process. I'm interested in ephemerality, what the Japanese call mujo, which is translated as 'the bittersweet impermanence of all life'.

DW: Early on, you made a series of ephemeral floating pieces which seem to be a precursor to your later work with books: free-floating scriptable surfaces or 'pages' released into a range of other fluid processes.

BI: I did a lot of floating pieces in Canada: academic 'lessons', chalk marks on canvas with some elements erased, which were embedded in ice and then floated down rivers. And I would follow them, track their journeys, and eventually retrieve the canvas from the shoreline. I would also go into university lecture rooms after classes to record photographically the traces, erasures, and fragments on blackboards - the poetics of traces and erasures that were left on the blackboards in the wake of a lesson. I documented them all over the world, often in languages I couldn't understand. A fragmentary, elliptical, found poetry. At this time, referencing the death of my husband, I created a large, complex performance work, The Metaphysics of Erasures.

DW: Your carved wooden books use materials that come from what's there in specific sites. There are narratives buried in these 'books of nature', or 'hydrolibros' as you've called them. The 'texts' they contain relate associatively to ecological issues. In one book made in the Dominican Republic, you used fragments of crocodile skulls. You've also used turtle shells, for example, or salmon bones, always from specific contexts. It seems you conceive of all of your work as a kind of library-in-process, a living transforming archive within which the gaps in maps are inviting and active. When did you start making the earth-covered book pieces?

BI: When I moved to New Mexico. These carved wooden book shapes are coated with earth from a certain location and are inscribed on the edges to resemble paginated volumes. Then I use small found natural objects from the site that have something to say about that specific place, and create a kind of international ecological language as 'text'. For example, Molybedenum Mine Volumes I and II commemorate a huge scar that gapes across acres of abused wilderness in northern New Mexico. Wandering illegally among the heaps of discarded mining equipment, the 'text' I found for this book was fool's gold and rust - poetic justice for this site, the tailings of which have killed aquatic habitat for miles downstream in the Red River. The names of a few of these sculptural books are Moss Agate Archive, about a trip along the length of the Yellowstone, the only major undammed river in the US; Beaver Stick Encyclopedia, using numerous chewed beaver sticks; Rain Forest (Black Sand and Turtle Egg Shells), about Costa Rica.

There is also a series called River Books, which began when I discovered that some library had dumped part of its collection in a gorge near Taos, and the books had been lying in the open air for years; there were rabbit turds on them, grass was growing up through the pages, people had used them for target practice, and they were completely rotten. These grotty objects attracted me as part of a generative cyclical transformation. These books had been trees once, then they were in a library in paper form, then were outside again, dumped into a huge pile - and it was as if those words were returning back into the earth. I took them into the studio, dried them out, then halted the process of deterioration into further decay by covering them in layers of beeswax, and then suspending them. Through the amber translucency of the beeswax, some of the words are still legible but not all ...

DW: A lot of the books, like your other work, construct a tension between information revealed and withheld, between transparency and opacity or containment: partial revelations. And I think it was Thoreau who wrote something about decayed literature making the best soil. This cycle of a return to the earth is a resonant ecological loop, another oroboros.

Perhaps it's inevitable that books, maps, charts, logs, registers and traces of journeys and fragile sites, and so on, should come together in the form of 'libraries'. I'm thinking both in terms of the portable repositories you make, and in terms of your unfinished novel The Library of Waters, which you've described as a kind of praise poem based on the hydrological cycle. I very much enjoyed the fragment I have read, its self-reflexive connections with your ongoing water work, as well as its interrogative relationship to the very project of a library: the claim to knowing represented by mapping, charting, collecting, categorising, cataloguing, archiving. And related to this, its fundamental in-finitude: it seems uncompletable. The very materials of the library - in this case water - resist the fixities and orderly containments of the institutional apparatus, and there is a great play-ful tension in this resistance and ultimate overflowing. Does the writing of The Library of Waters represent part of a navigation of your twin roles as artist and academic, working with very different kinds of knowledges and experiences?

BI: Absolutely. I love books and respect book knowledge. But it is only ever partial, a complement to experiential knowledges which are harder to articulate but almost always more meaningful. In the video documentary I made for The Gathering of Waters project, I say that this is not about sitting in a boardroom or classroom indoors theorising about rivers, it's about physically being at the river and experiencing it first-hand.

DW: That's very palpable in your documentary film, A Gathering of Waters; The Rio Grande, Source to Sea - showing people's individual and collective engagements in embodied ways with the cultures of the river, in terms of community, bio-diversity, connectivities and flows, and the enormous physical joy people have in relation to water in the film. As a proposition and an actuality, it's a wonderful project: a grassroots, community-based initiative to collect and convey water from a river's source all along its course to a release point in the sea at the Gulf of Mexico. How did it come about?

BI: The Gathering of Waters project came about for several reasons. Because the Rio completely dries up and becomes a river of sand in several places due to natural drought and human mismanagement, we wanted to help it do something it can no longer do by itself - flow all the way to the ocean. I also wanted people to be aware that there is always an upstream and a downstream, and to connect diverse communities along the entire 1,875-mile length, to form an on-going dialogue.
I had been travelling internationally and making work, but I wanted to do something that was of the area where I live my daily life. The Rio Grande runs right through Albuquerque. I was attending river meetings and people described the river as if it were a cut-up pie with the middle Rio Grande disconnected from anything upstream or downstream; it had no beginning and no end.
Originally, there was a lot of skepticism about whether such a project could be realised. However I refused to listen and in 1995 I began in Southern Colorado, at the headwaters in a beautiful alpine meadow area in the San Juan mountains, with pine trees and waterfalls. From there the river flows through New Mexico, forms the border between Texas and Mexico in the vast Chijuahuan desert, and eventually enters a Palm Grove at the Gulf. This is all the same river, but incredibly different contexts.
A special canteen, called the River Vessel, was passed by the carrier downstream from one community to the next. Small water samples were added from each community as hundreds of people extended a hand to someone upstream, received the Vessel, added their own contribution of water from the Rio, wrote in the Log Book, and passed these along to another person downstream. Folks travelled with the River Vessel and its accompanying Log Book by boat, raft, canoe, hot-air balloon, car, van, horseback, truck, bicycle, mail and by foot - all the way to the sea. My aim was for the gathering and passing of the waters to restore symbolically a natural function of the river and generate understanding, enthusiasm, and a sense of continuity and a mutual understanding of riverside communities. It was a celebration of this great river and its cultures.

Native American runners carried the vessel through numerous pueblo villages. Running is a sacred activity for many tribal peoples around the world, it's considered a form of prayer; and they were really pleased to be involved in such a way, carrying the water by running. They ran about 150 miles in two days in a relay of mile long sections. As we went into each pueblo - and none of this could be filmed - there was an exchange of water. They would put water into the canteen, and we would give them some of the water already gathered - an affirming of connections. People who lived half an hour apart but had never met encountered each other through this project. In the film, the ranger who hands on the vessel to the Kickapoo Tribe had never met any members of that community; and they're still working together now. Those kinds of connections were one of the most important aspects of the project as a whole. They take on a life of their own.

The Gathering project took its own time. And when it finally arrived at Boca Chica in late 1998, we had a huge celebration down there at the mouth of the river by the ocean; people flew from the Upper Basin, the Lower Basin, at their own expense. They wanted to be there for that final moment of releasing the waters gathered from the river into the sea. It felt like an act of compassion, a gift. And such a 'gathering' could be created anywhere internationally; it doesn't belong to me.

DW: The structure of this project offers a very simple strategy for enabling and affirming connections en route, a navigatory reparation of separation. And it's endlessly relocatable and redefinable as a performative social score. I know you've made a simpler version by the Don River in Toronto, for example, which you describe as a stream 'straightjacketed' between a four-lane highway and railroad tracks.

BI: Yes. This project can hopefully help inspire other riverside communities anywhere in the world to find their common heritage. And each 'gathering' will be different, because each river is a different being.

DW: One of your more recent works, Kit for Paddling Through Stars Floating on a Lake, which you made at Lac Jumeau in Quebec in 2000, is very much a navigatory score that seems to bring together a number of recurrent fascinations. Could you describe this work and its making?

BI: When I left New Mexico for the residency in Canada, I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived. Three of us were invited by a group called boréal to make work in the Laurentian Mountains in Northern Quebec. The group's focus is on ecological issues. During my stay, there was one artist from Italy, one from Mexico and myself. The other two artists chose to go off into the forest and work there, but I walked out onto the dock by the lake and worked there the whole time. I would get up at dawn and paddle through mist, which was incredibly mysterious and beautiful. It was the one time of day when the lake was still, and you could immerse yourself in this thick fog.

As I said, I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived. There was an old canoe which no one else would go in because it was very tippy. I decided I'd carve my own paddles. So I started out with these two huge linden logs, or limewood, and began carving. On one side of the paddle I put images of the constellations, the night sky over Quebec in the winter; on the other side was a map of where we were, Lac Jumeau, 'Twin Lake'. I devised different handles for them and designed the two paddles so that they could even be joined together like a kayak paddle.

I made a long box to contain all the pieces, and put wheels on it so it could be pulled. I've returned again and again to this idea of portability. On the inside lid of the box were aerial maps of the lake, photos of stars floating on the water and mud from the lake shore mixed with matt medium.
The paddles worked well, and at night I would fill the boat with candles and ferry people out to a floating dock. There was an old Adirondack chair out there, and I made a shelter with aromatic cedar boughs. So the floating platform became a one-person arched observatory that you could sit within to contemplate the lake and stars - to be on a floating platform quietly by yourself.

DW: The video image from this work reproduced in your catalogue suggests an enactment of a nekyia, a night water crossing, to a liminal still point that hovers between a reflection of the sky in the lake's surface and the sky itself. It looks a little like being on one of your airborne boats riding through the sky ...

BI: That's a nice comparison. For the video of the Quebec piece, I floated candles in the water and they formed another layer of constellations. The image you're referring to, I photographed very early in the morning in the mist, so that you can't see the horizon and can't tell which direction is up or down. And I used that ambiguous image in the catalogue because I wanted the idea of the journey to something about which you're not quite certain - which is what our lives are like. Navigatory processes. We never know what's around the next bend in the river. A lot of my work relates metaphorically or literally to navigation. It's also concerned with currents: currents in water, but also being in the current of the present moment. In any negotiation of the moment, one needs to orient oneself by attending to energies that are actually there.