Susan Knight is a painter and installation artist based in Omaha, Nebraska, who has focused since 2002 on the aesthetic and scientific qualities of water. What sets her apart from other visual artists with the same interests, though, is the presentation of her subject matter. Using an X-Acto blade as her implement of choice, Knight hand-cuts her interpretations of water out of Tyvek, paper, plastic and Mylar, concentrating on the negative spaces that the cutting process creates.

The resulting pieces contain intricate patterns, many of which reflect water’s archetypical movements, such as the “vortex action” and the “fat triangle and egg shape,” that take place under the surface of all rivers and in ocean currents. Knight admitted to me in our recent conversation that she will never understand the molecular science behind these movements but that they do guide the shapes she makes.

Origins of Cutting Water

Knight did not always use the X-Acto blade to hand-cut works of art, nor did she always consider water to be her chosen subject matter. In fact, prior to 2002, she was a realistic figurative painter who had been dependent on photographic references to guide her work. That year, however, she was
determined to participate in an exhibition on rivers that had been organized to honor a friend who had recently died.

Initially unsure how to proceed, Knight was eventually inspired by a show at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, which had been comprised entirely of hand-cut paper imagery. She decided to hand-cut a representation of the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan as her contribution to the river exhibition. She had grown up alongside the Grand River and knew its contours. Although Knight had originally thought of this project as a one-time effort, she soon realized that the process of hand-cutting and the subject of water were artistically liberating to her and offered endless imaginative possibilities.

Wanting to learn more about the science of water and what was beneath the surface, Knight began studying the bodies of water near where she has lived. She gathered information on the breakdown of the ecosystem in the Great Lakes as well as the quality of groundwater in Nebraska and then
translated the research data into visual patterns that reflected these environmental conditions, most of which had been impacted by climate change. Her earliest work focused on the visual patterns found in Zebra mussels and Spiny Tail Water Fleas, two species that have invaded the Great Lakes through the ballast water that was illegally discharged from ocean-going vessels traveling through the St. Lawrence River. As the water of the Great Lakes has warmed, the Zebra mussel (and other alien species) has found a habitat suited to breeding. The proliferation of the species has contributed to the decimation of the local fishing industry, and the spread of its shell fragments has transformed the sand on local beaches.

Since 2002, Knight has also examined the riparian habitats (the wetlands adjacent to rivers and streams) of the Yampa River in Colorado, mixed-use issues in the Hudson River in New York and preservation efforts in the Amazon. For all of her projects, Knight used the book, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air  by Theodore Schwenk, as her go-to reference guide on “the laws apparent in the subtle patterns in water movement.”

Materials and Method

Knight’s earliest pieces were cut entirely out of paper. Over time, she began to experiment with Mylar, a polyester film, for its translucent, ethereal qualities. In a 2014 interview in Sci Art in America, Knight admitted that “I like engaging in an ancient technique common in many countries with a contemporary product that reflects my contemporary approach.”

Eventually, when she wanted to apply color to her cuttings, Knight incorporated Tyvek, a material made from high-density polyethylene
fibers that is stronger than paper and is commonly used as a protective sheet underneath the finished exterior of buildings. She discovered that the material absorbs acrylic ink beautifully and being water-resistant, remains flat when exposed to the paint.

As part of her working process, Knight draws on the surface of her designated material before she cuts but edits as the piece progresses.

Lucky Links

Knight’s most recent installations are entitled, Lucky Links and Water Bank, Boogie.

Knight’s intention with the 2019 installation Lucky Links was to “link” the opposing and divisive forces in our society today with the opposing forces existing in nature that have led to positive outcomes. The example of positive natural forces she uses in the installation is the formation of crystal, which occurs when the dissimilar elements of water and rock are combined over time. As she states on her website,

Over millenniums (sic) opposing forces and cycles in nature cooperated to support continual growth and creation. Is this unique phenomenon of cooperation in nature a link to our own culture’s successful survival?

Lucky Links visually represents my reflections on our polarized American culture, and the natural world. Suspended, hand-cut, Tyvek crystal patterns represent early interactions between water and rock that produced crystal. Camouflage components are hand-cut with faces and painted with the colors of human skin and portray our culture.

Water Bank, Boogie

Knight is currently working on a sixth iteration of her installation, Water Bank, Boogie. Previous versions have been installed in The Nordstrom Gallery, Wayne State College, Wayne Nebraska; The Kaneko, Omaha, Nebraska; the Garrison Art Center, Garrison, New York; Mid-America
Arts Alliance, Kansas City, Missouri; and Artprize, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The installations are based on Knight’s 2012 experience in the field with Nebraskan hydro geologists who were testing the ground water in soil samples to determine the health of the water. The red, yellow, gray and
green in the installations are the same colors used by the geologists to color
code the samples according to the categorization of clay, gravel, sand and
silt. The highly porous nature of the hand-cuts components alludes to the wide buffer zones, soil remediation and water bank erosion and remediation.

When I asked Knight to describe the reaction of the scientists to her large-scale installations based on their work, she responded that they were struck by how people outside of their discipline cared about what they were doing. She added that they were also delighted to see a super-sized, artist’s interpretation of the science.

Knight’s hand-cut works and installations are remarkable for their aesthetic beauty, for their inventive presentation of an age-old artistic discipline using contemporary materials and for their allusions to the scientific nature of water in our current, precarious world.  As she readily admits, Knight feels as if “she has no choice” in focusing all of her work on water, that “it is directing her,” rather than the other way around.

(Top image: Water Pods, hand-cut paper components, Tyvek and acrylic ink. Gallery 72, Omaha, Nebraska, 2016. All photos courtesy of the artist.)

This article is part of Imagining Water, a series on artists of all genres who are making the topic of water and climate change a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances, projects and publications that are appearing in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides, our new plastic seas and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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by Mary Woodbury

In this feature, I cover the novel Wide as the Wind, by author Edward Stanton, who landed on the idea for his award-winning book during a trip to Easter Island, situated 2,300 miles west off the Chilean coast and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. He conducted much of his research for Wide as the Wind on Easter Island itself. He is the author of eleven books, some translated into Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. He has published fiction, poetry, essays and translations in journals throughout the U.S., Latin America and Europe, where he has lectured at universities and cultural centers. Stanton has been a Fulbright fellow in Argentina and Uruguay and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education and the government of Spain. He was named the A.R. Sánchez Distinguished Lecturer at Texas A&M International University in 2003 and Distinguished Alumnus at UCLA in 2007.

Rapa Nui

Imagine the earliest days of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) – an isolated Chilean island surrounded by the infinite blue waters of the southeastern Pacific and the gentle nods of tall palms waving in the wind. The first settlers, who arrived on the shores from AD 690±130, were Polynesian, and a look at their and other settlers’ history reveals a microcosm of planet Earth’s destruction – at least according to the suggestions in Jared Diamond’s article “Easter’s End” in Discover Magazine, 1995. By 1500, craftspeople had built up to 900 or so moais – monolithic statues – which represented family status and power but also symbolized sacred spirit. According to Diamond, early resource grabs went into the production of these statues. History.com states:

Averaging 13 feet (4 meters) high, with a weight of 13 tons, these enormous stone busts – known as moai – were carved out of tuff (the light, porous rock formed by consolidated volcanic ash) and placed atop ceremonial stone platforms called ahus.

The island, originally full of tall palms, also suffered deforestation. As William and Mary University reports:

When Polynesian explorers first arrived between 800 and 1200 AD, the island landscape was lush with palm forests. The prevailing theory holds that settlers’ slash-and-burn farming practices led to extreme deforestation, explained [paleoclimatologist Nick] Balascio, an assistant professor of geology at William & Mary.

Diamond’s theory suggests that such deforestation caused serious erosion of the volcanic-rich soil around the island. Famine, in-fighting, cannibalism, and lack of fresh water and food resulted. Eventually, the island’s great palm forests vanished, and the population dwindled. In 1772, on Easter Day, Dutch sailor Jacob Roggeveen navigated to the island – his contact was followed by Spanish sailors in November of that year, and later the French. By the mid-19th century, Peruvian contact stole nearly all the remaining population and made them slaves, resulting in just a little over one hundred islanders left. Smallpox had also been introduced.

In 2011, Scientific American rebutted some of Diamond’s previous studies with newer studies showing that a second set of hypotheses dealt with a possible massive impact of past climate changes, like prolonged droughts, on an already unstable island environment and society:

In the end, the most intriguing questions remain still unanswered: Did the former inhabitants destroy completely the island’s dense subtropical forest, causing their own demise? Was Rapa Nui since the beginnings of human colonization a poor environment, covered only with local spots of forest and was it a drought, maybe in combination with human impact, that finally triggered the extinction of the already rare plant species? Did the natives realize the impending change – did they even care?

Environmental Stress and the Cult of the Birdman

From Zegrahm.com:

Worship of the mythological half-man, half-bird figure appeared on Rapa Nui sometime during the 1500s, emblemized by its giant stone guardians, replacing the ancestral worship typical throughout Polynesia. Believers toppled many of the ancient statues and destroyed smaller ones. While there are more than 1,800 petroglyphs and stone houses in the ceremonial village of Orongo, where the Birdman cult was centered, Hoa Hakananai’a was the only moai to survive – and only after the winged symbolism was added.

So what caused this seismic shift in sacred beliefs? The general consensus is that the avian adulation grew from environmental stresses. Located nearly 3,000 miles off Chile’s coast, Easter Island is one of the most remote places on the planet. When Polynesians first arrived there, it was as verdant as the Hawaiian archipelago; but after hundreds of years of deforestation, the island was barren by the time the first Europeans arrived in 1722. With their gods and earthly rulers seemingly failing them, inhabitants abruptly abandoned moai carving and turned to their warrior class or matatoa for guidance.

The birdman cult was taken over by Christian missionaries later in the 19th century. Prior to then, it is suggested by History.com that the cult of the birdman had been a way of recognizing the destruction of the environment with the birth of a new ideology that would better balance power versus resources. The sooty tern (and its eggs) remained a food source.

Wide as the Wind

Edward Stanton’s Wide as the Wind is inspired by the history of such islands as Rapa Nui. Library Journal states:

This historical novel centers on a little-known chapter of Polynesian history – no island is specified, but the narrative conjures up Easter Island and others. Many of these islands were impoverished because of deforestation, so their best and brightest were sent on ocean voyages to obtain seed stock for trees in distant places. (In 1947, Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl tried to replicate such a journey with modern boat-building technologies and found building the boat difficult. The voyage itself was harrowing.) Protagonist Miru is a valiant hero, sailing into the sunset and bringing back trees and plants that are essential to the viability of his close-knit community.

And National Geographic reports:

Wide as the Wind portrays Polynesian voyages across the Pacific Ocean in canoes with no metal parts or instruments: the greatest adventure in human prehistory, as bold as modern space voyages.

The novel was awarded the 2018 Feathered Quill Award for Teen Fiction and was the winner in 2017 of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Young Adult Fiction as well as the Moonbeam Award for Young Adult Fiction.

I was thrilled to chat with Edward Stanton. Our conversation follows:

Can you tell us how you were inspired to write the book?

When I read Jared Diamond’s famous article about the collapse of Easter Island’s habitat, titled “Easter’s End,” in Discover magazine (August 1995), I wondered if anyone had ever written a novel about this momentous event that is a cautionary tale for our times.  I could not find such a book in any language.  Years later, after reading everything available and traveling to Easter Island, I realized that ecological disaster could be a powerful subject for a novel.  With a great sense of responsibility, I began writing.

What’s it like on the island?

Rapa Nui has an austere beauty of its own.  Imagine a place that somehow combines the Black Hills of South Dakota, the prairies of the Midwest, extinct volcanoes on an island whose coasts are dotted with monolithic moais or ancestral statues, all of it surrounded by the bluest ocean you can imagine. It’s unlike any other place in the world. Although it’s Polynesian in its location and in the culture of its people, the climate is subtropical; it can be cold and rainy, and there are no tiki bars.

Can you tell us about the novel – what takes place, the main characters, the young adult/teen heroes?

Wide as the Wind is above all a story of love and adventure, but it also deals with deforestation and the collapse of a natural habitat on a prehistoric Polynesian island.  It could be compared to the Disney film Moana, but there the environmental destruction is attributed to a cartoon monster; people, not monsters, were the real cause.

When his island is ravaged by war, hunger and destruction, Miru, the fifteen-year-old son of a tribal warrior, must sail to a distant island in order to find the seeds and shoots of trees that could reforest their homeland. If he decides to undertake the voyage, he must leave behind Kenetéa, a young woman from an enemy tribe with whom he has fallen deeply in love. And if Miru and his crew survive the storms, sharks and marauding ships that await them on a journey over uncharted ocean, an even greater mission would lie ahead.  They must show their people that devotion to the earth and sea can be as strong as war and hatred.

Miru and most of the other main characters of the novel are teenagers, but the novel has also appealed to older readers and been chosen by adult reading clubs.

Wide as the Wind has a beautiful book trailer which will help your readers have a sense of the novel.

The trailer looks like a movie trailer, and is so gorgeous. It’s a movie I would go and see. The trailer is also how I first found your book.

You’ve traveled quite a bit throughout your life, and you also wrote about your long walk on the Camino de Santiago, from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. Doing such a walk is my personal dream, so I’d love to hear more about your travels, including that journey.

After following the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago, one realizes that all of our travels are pilgrimages of one sort or another, that we are merely passing through our lives the way a walker moves toward Compostela, Rome, Mecca or the Ganges. I’m very happy to learn that doing such a walk is a personal dream for you. I hope that you will make all efforts to realize it, because it can only change your life for the better. I’ve never met a pilgrim for whom the walk was not a memorable and transforming experience. As people tell pilgrims on the road to Santiago, “Buen Camino!”

Well, someday I hope to write to you about my own journey!

What sort of changes have you seen around the world that could be attributed to climate change and other ecological collapse? And, getting back to Wide as the Wind, how have such islands as the fictional one in your novel actually been affected in real life?  What are you seeing as you travel there?  How have rising seas and the intensity of storms threatened people, landscapes, cultures?

After being deforested some 600 years ago, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is still mostly bare of trees.  In other words, what a people does to its habitat at a given time can have enduring consequences. In Wide as the Wind, I give the island another name – Vaitéa, which means “white water” – in order to expand the book’s imaginative reach to all of Polynesia. In addition to Rapa Nui, numerous other Pacific Islands have been deforested, depleted, fished out and seen their habitats decline: the Cooks, Wallis and Futuna, parts of French Polynesia and Hawaii. Rising seas and climate change will harm many more islands in the Pacific and other oceans.

How important do you think it is, in fiction, to tackle such issues, and how do you think fiction can reach the heart (unlike data, news)?

A good question that contains part of a good answer. It is one thing to read an article, essay or nonfiction book about environmental disaster, and another to see how it shatters a person’s and a people’s lives. Good fiction may seem more real than our everyday existence, and we may come to know a novelistic character better than we know ourselves, our family or friends.

What are you working on now?

Sir Richard F. Burton, the great British explorer and writer (for whom the actor was named), used to work on a dozen or so books at a time. I’m only working on two: a travel memoir based in Mexico and Spain, and a literary thriller set in the aftermath of the “Dirty War” in Argentina.

Sounds great, Edward. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.

A Cautionary Tale

Today Rapa Nui (now owned by Chile) is a World Heritage Site and has around 6,000 inhabitants. It’s a big tourist destination, bringing in 80,000 visitors a year. If this isolated paradise hadn’t first been devastated by Polynesian culture, modern crises resulting from waste and plastic would still be in store. According to the BBC, tourists produce 20 tons of rubbish per day, including 40,000 plastic bottles per month. While these can be recycled, much of the island’s garbage ends up in landfills, which attracts mosquitoes, dogs, and rats. Waste has to be fumigated to mitigate dengue, a mosquito-borne virus. With more people wishing to make the island their home, mostly in order to start new tourist shops and restaurants, over-fishing has also become an issue.

Stanton’s tale imagines early Polynesian island culture and how things might have been different today if a young adult hero, such as Miru from the novel, decided – with the help of a priestess – to reforest the island, which would have led its people down a different path. The story is well-written: a coming-of-age hero story with love as its essence. One can sense that even though this haunting tale is beautiful and immersive, we can infer from it a modern perspective on how cultural expectations can be broken in order to achieve something positive and fair. For instance, when Miru’s uncle gives him permission to sail to another island for seeds, he allows Renga Roiti (Miru’s sister) to go, when girls would not have been allowed to go on such a boat journey. After all, Renga Roiti’s totem sisters were the sooty terns that produced such sacred eggs. We also can look at the novel as a drawn-out fable, something we can learn from. But such a lesson is one we should already know, one we have not abided by. So, reminders are good, I think. We may look at the island of Vaitéa as a microcosm of our present Earth, and if we zoom out, it’s easy to wonder: what have we learned in the last few centuries? 80% of the world’s forests have been destroyed, according to the Global Forest Resources Assessment (2010). We are still destroying them, even though many modern-day Mirus exist.

Climate change also makes islands vulnerable, and Rapa Nui is not exempt. According to How Stuff Works:

The nearly 1,000 moai, erected between the 10th and 16th centuries on Rapa Nui (also named Easter Island by an 18th-century Dutch explorer), are being battered by rising sea levels, high-energy waves and increased erosion, as detailed on March 15, 2018, in The New York Times. Ancient human remains are buried beneath many of the works, which appear as giant faces gazing over land and sea.

“Some of the moai have been knocked over in the past – including by tsunamis – and they have been restored. So not every site is in pristine condition,” says Adam Markham, deputy director of climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The difference now is that the danger is even greater. The rate of change is faster than ever.” As Markham points out, all of the world’s islands have been made vulnerable to erosion with rising ocean levels. Some climate models predict that increased melting of the world’s ice sheets could cause oceans to rise by 5 or 6 feet (1.5 or 1.8 meters) by the year 2100. Higher sea levels mean shores face flooding and inundation by crashing waves.

It seems that islands like Rapa Nui were doomed from the beginning, from long-ago locals destroying natural resources and now also from the world at large doing the same, and either of these scenarios fares badly for the island. In the global eco-novel, there is a chance, I think, to speak to all readers’ hearts, no matter where we live, with the pure imagination of storytelling that reminds us of things and people we love, and how we can save them. In the novel, Muri has a quest to save his island. Perhaps we should go on the quest to save our world. Thanks to author Edward Stanton for looking at a delicate area in the world and engaging in its historic culture in order to bring such an imaginative cautionary tale.

(Top image: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. William Hodges, Easter Island.)

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change(Routledge). Mary lives in the lower mainland of British Columbia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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by Peterson Toscano

This month’s podcast features circus artist and podcaster Eliana Dunlap. She is using circus arts to raise awareness about climate change. Eliana was not born into a circus family; instead she learned circus arts at a circus school in the province of Quebec in Canada. Her circus skill set is impressive and includes acrobatics, juggling, dance, and her specialty, the German Wheel. She has been performing circus arts in non-traditional spaces. She is also someone who is creatively responding to climate change. Through her podcast, “Changing the World and Other Circus Related Things,” she is connecting with other concerned circus artists. She is one of the founding members of the Circus Action Network.

Eliana likens the high-stakes world of circus arts to the challenges we face with climate change. She sees examples in the circus world of how we can get people from various backgrounds to work together. This summer she and a friend will do street performances of a new circus art show called High Stakes – What’s the Plan(t)? In addition to lots of juggling and acrobatics, the show features a live plant as part of the action.

In this fascinating interview, Eliana opens up about the world of circus and how she and other concerned artists are creating avenues for a deeper conversation about climate change.

Coming up next month,  Elizabeth Doud takes on the role of Siren Jones in her one-person performance, The Mermaid Tear Factory. She also explains why she sees Miami as a city of the future.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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