The Measure of Ana Springs

An elegy for a spring that is also an ode to water, birds, and color.

At the northern tip of the Great Basin in southeastern Oregon, Ana Springs surfaces water that has spent more than a thousand years filtering through volcanic rock. It is the sole source of a river, a lake, and nineteen thousand acres of marsh on the Pacific Flyway. People in the basin rely on this water, as do hundreds of thousands of birds on their long migrations. Industrial agriculture (mainly alfalfa grown for export) and a changing climate are rapidly depleting the aquifer that feeds the springs.

I began the project by extending feldmestn — an Ashkenazi practice in which women measured graves with linen thread, then made that thread into the wicks of memorial candles — to Ana Springs. I measured the edges of the reservoir and the lake, the length of the river, and the wingspans and skulls of animals who depend on this water. The threads became the wicks of eighteen beeswax candles; eighteen is chai, the number that represents life.

Alongside the candles, I made a set of 44 mineral, botanical, and animal pigments from the watershed; a painting on translucent silk using those pigments; a woven cross-section of the basin, dyed with the same materials; a weaving to hold the unlit candles; and a book of poetry, essay, and images. The painting and the cross-section weaving are meant to be seen, and seen through: hung outdoors against the basin, they let the land and waters they’re made of show through them. Foreground and background flicker; perception flexes; new feelings and ideas are made.

This work is an invitation to grieve — the first step toward any change. Grieving requires the presence of the actual lost thing, the way a funeral requires the body. What is present here is the body of the place, transformed: measured into candles, ground into color, dyed into thread, made into sentences and lines. Ecological grief is often felt as numbness; this work makes the loss small enough to carry, so that together we can feel what is too large to know.

Completed during this residency: PLAYA Wildfire + Water

A page showing the Ana Springs visual work is coming soon.