Water Cups is a multi-media project proposed to examine the causes and effects of climate change on water system and peoples in the Mendocino area. Through this work, handmade clay cups will be crafted to include overlays of fragmented texts and images using a simple process of transferring ink-printed materials onto clay. The cups will receive a translucent glaze to highlight these juxtaposed words and images.
Water Cups will symbolize a purposeful reestablishment of human relationships to water, one more personal and intentional. Engaging archival and ethnographic research, this work will explore both Indigenous and Western modes of thought surrounding the natural world, specifically the resource of water.
Seth Garcia will create a series of interwoven poems responding to industrialization through local histories and stories about changing water systems and the ways they have affected the area and peoples. These poems will be fragmented and used as source material for transferring onto cups.
Karina Faulstich is a multi-media artist and performer whose work is largely concerned with the intersections of nature and society. Confronting Mendocino’s changing water systems within a global context, Karina will draw upon her work with ceramics to sculpt the cups.
Collaboratively, Karina and Seth will integrate other images and text found throughout their combined research. Although aesthetically linked, and crafted with similar materials and ideas, each Water Cup will be unique in the series. Accompanied by the cups will be a small handmade edition of Water Poemswritten by Seth throughout the residency.
Once the Water Cups are finished, Seth and Karina will host a community event in which Seth will recite his poetry while Karina performs a ritual to activate the cups. The event will allow Water Cups to be displayed and open further discourse surrounding climate change within the local/global context of Mendocino.
This is a project of remediation; through the utilization and juxtaposition of cultures and experiences, these Water Cups will address, and symbolically redress, our current water crisis in the context of climate disruption. By transferring and overlaying fragments of history and poetic response, we wish to offer a visual and interactive experience that fosters contemplation of our changing experience with water.
New and radical understandings of our relationships with water are necessary if we are to create modern socio-natural systems that are sustaining. Together, a North Street Collective Residency will allow us to work in an experimental fashion across several disciplines, sharing our strengths and developing a strong body of work responding to the way life evolves in tandem with water in the face of a dramatically changing and industrializing world.
