LUNG WATER Installation

Photo by Nick Bleeker

Backbone Arts 2018 How Soon Is Now? Festival
Featured in Emergency Index Vol. 8 (Ugly Duckling Presse, NYC, 2019)

LUNG WATER was a performance installation comprised of a time-based ice sculpture, short films of bodily estrangement performed for camera, and light installation.

LUNG WATER was a torrential prayer to slow atrophy, an ode to temporary forms, and an exploration of containers as porous structures for holding exquisite moments of rapid change. Inspired by Anne Carson’s “Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.” (Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995), LUNG WATER explores the in-breath as a case study for the simultaneous beauty and rage of entanglement, and our competing desires to both be one with our environment and extricate ourselves from it.

LUNG WATER was installed/performed in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia - whose traditional owners, the Turrbal People, I’d like to pay my respects. The performance space was under a Queenslander-style, old bowls club – an architectural design characterised by vertical stilts beneath the building which creates a cavernous space beneath the main structure allowing it to “float” above the terrain and built to cope with Queensland’s iconic subtropical flooding. LUNG WATER incorporated two abandoned industrial-sized water tanks installed at the site in the early 1980’s that were connected via pipework and were reminiscent of lungs. Another site-specific feature included 80+ stones collected from East Brisbane river area which defend against moving water along the riverbank and give natural protection against erosion. These stones were used to mount the ice sculpture and were replaced back into the landscape at the conclusion of the performance. 

The ice sculpture weighed 130kg, took five days to produce, melted in 38 hours, and was interwoven between two found metal supports from pool-side chaise lounges. These structures had a history of holding bodies, and during the performance water moved through them. 

That weekend it rained. 

The ice fell over due to tropical early summer wind. It began to melt unevenly as winds and humidity began to re-mould and imprint the disappearing sculpture. 

Audiences came and went.