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The Poetics of Water

The origin of this project is an obsession with the complexities and fantastical nature of water in the urban context. This project is grounded in a series of “how to” questions:

How to capture moments of water? How to represent the inconsistencies of water? How to illustrate the permeability and perforation of water? How to extract the invisible parts of the urban water system? How to depict the multiplicity and multi-scalar nature of the (largely invisible) urban water system? How to draw the poetics of water?

However, these questions ultimately highlight how humans work to control water and how disconnected humans are from water in the urban context. The most tangible source of life is somehow the most invisible.

Water consists of just three atoms, one oxygen and two hydrogens, yet its complexities are countless.

Water is transparent, yet reflects light. Water is gentle and life-giving, yet destructive and life-taking.
Water is natural and wild, yet ordinary and domesticated.

This project works to emphasize the human desire to control water, the simplicity and complexity of water, and the overwhelming realization of how interconnected water really is, and how sometimes, the most invisible truly becomes the most visible.