Water Art Archive: Water Art is the new Land Art
Land Art was primarily concern with a making marks directly in the
landscape. Often temporary or remote, documentation was
fundamental to the conception of the work satisfying the dichotomy of
Site and Non Site. Land Art tended to be singular in its conception and
creation.In contrast, Water Art is collaborative and conceived of through a sense of community urgency, care and connectedness to climate change. Through this community process, artists are working as advocates and building civic agency, engaging in discussions with planners, scientists, politicians and government agencies to bring clarity to the issues we face, build awareness and stewardship and seek potential adaptive futures. Water Artists focus on our waterways as a means of discovery, knowing and empowerment, highlighting its expressive potential through embodied knowledge and our relationship to water.
Central to this project is the definition of Water Art, created by Eve Mosher, Sarah Cameron Sunde, and Nancy Nowacek in 2016:
Water Art must meet BOTH of the following conditions...
• The work self-defines, first and foremost, as art.
• A body (or bodies) of water is central to the work’s concept.
Additionally, the work recognizes that water is alive and dynamic, and therefore experiential rather than representational. It must meet at least ONE of the following conditions:
1. If object-based, a body of water (and/or its shorelines) is used as MATERIAL in the physical production of the work.
As referenced in Sarah Cameron Sunde’s essay, “Environmental Art for the 21st Century,” in the Works on Water Triennial 2017 Catalogue, “underlying these criteria is the idea that Water Art is a direct descendent of Land Art.” and goes on to say “But while the monumental interventions of Land Artist marked the earth, shaping it for generations to come, the large-scale conceptual works of Water Artists acknowledge urgency in the time-scale. The execution of the works is more ephemeral—happening over the course of a day or a month or an hour, often shifting human consciousness around the winter on a person-to-person scale.”
2. If time-based, a body of water and/or its shorelines is the SITE for the work, functioning as a “stage” and/or central “character” that embodies the temporality and/or spatiality of the work.
We welcome correspondence from artists whose work meets these conditions for inclusion in the archive.