Water Stories: Visual Poetics and Collective Voices

By Andrea Wollensak, 2021-2022 Anchorage Museum Artist-in-Residence

I am drawn to place, in particular the North, its culture, and its dynamic and rapidly changing landscape. Through my artwork, I draw on various sources and work collaboratively with communities, poets, scientists, and composers, striving to decenter a singular perspective. I am interested in multiple layers of voice, gathered scientific data, and diverse points of view that define a visioning process that ultimately explores the larger issues of climate change and the bio-loop of human impact on the global environment.

I live by the southeastern Connecticut shoreline where stronger storms are changing the Long Island Sound coastline and impacting our community. The place between land and water where sea level rise is marked by a wrack line, a tenuous edge and indicator of change. I recently completed a Connecticut-based project titled Reading the Wrack Lines that engaged the community through creative writing about our changing climate. The final work amplified participants’ voices (through audio/video projections on the Avery Point lighthouse at University of Connecticut campus.

Water Stories

On the other side of the country, Alaska is experiencing similar environmental changes at the coastline. Water Stories is a new community-based project that explores, through the voices of local residents, the changing climate in Anchorage and Alaska. Some of the central themes in the project include perceptions and narratives associated with waterways, shorelines, and sea level rise. For me, not being from Alaska, the collaborators living in Anchorage are the center of my work as I seek to center these voices through my artistic practice.

Water Stories is developing into multiple projects that extend in different ways to the Anchorage community: as video projections, poetry readings, public recording sessions and listening stations in the museum and around the city. These projects are in collaboration with Alaska poets, Anchorage residents, high school students, and Out North Radio.

As climate change alters our experiences of the land around us, the public is asked to consider the role of water in their lives. This event is in collaboration with Indra Arriaga Delgado, a Mexican artist, writer, and researcher working in Alaska. There will be two recording booths available for the public from 3:30-6 p.m: the Anchorage Museum Atrium, and at Out North Radio, located at 2601 Spenard Road.

Visual Poetics

Another component of Water Stories includes collaborations with Alaska poets Erin Coughlin Hollowell and Jen Stever Ruckle. This collaboration explores the intersections of place, writing, and visual forms of language. This work is evolving into an interactive video where the poet’s voice generatively draws visual forms and text. Environmental data may be included as additional source material for the compositions. This project explores both visual and audio manifestations of language as a shared boundary between graphic design, writing, and performance.

Collective Voices

Last fall, I also connected remotely with the Anchorage Museum’s Teen Climate Communicators, a climate change discussion group for high school students. The theme for their workshop was waterways, and our collaborations began with a series of Zoom meetings where I introduced, through the lens of creative writing, ways to observe, reflect and be inspired by the changing environment. Students explored environmental themes with visiting scientists and participated in a workshop with a local poet where they composed poems that they recorded.

Next Thursday, March 24, is an opportunity for the public to participate in sharing a one-minute reflection of their own by answering the question: What does water mean to you?

As climate change alters our experiences of the land around us, the public is asked to consider the role of water in their lives. This event is in collaboration with Indra Arriaga Delgado, a Mexican artist, writer, and researcher working in Alaska. There will be two recording booths available for the public from 3:30-6 p.m: the Anchorage Museum Atrium, and at Out North Radio, located at 2601 Spenard Road.

This multi-prong project is part of a long-term residency with the Anchorage Museum that began last fall and will culminate in a series of listening sessions to be broadcast in and around the city of Anchorage, and interactive video projections on the museum façade during October and November 2022.

Images: All photos courtesy Andrea Wollensak