Water Spirit

Basia Irland is a pioneer artist and activist who focuses on water. She spoke to The Environment to mark the publication of Reading the River, The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland, a retrospective of her work.

Why does water inspire you?

We are water. Our bodies house streams: lymph, bile, sweat, blood, mucus, urine. Water enters, circulates, leaves – individualised hydrologic cycles. Each of us is a walking ocean, sloshing down the hallway with damp saline innards, held together by a paper-thin epidermis.

We are all connected through the continuous water cycle. Rivers are alive. I was grateful when the Maori in New Zealand won a court case that granted the Whanganui River legal personhood. This relationship, Te Awa Tupua, means that the river and the people form an integrated whole.

Water has always fed my soul; floating weightless in a natural lake, face up, looking at the clouds, sitting and listening on a rock beside an ever-changing mountain stream, hiking to the source of a river, wading barefoot in a cold creek. Memories from my personal library of the senses go hand in hand with academic research for every water project I create.

Because I live in New Mexico, my external watershed is the Río Grande, but my internal watershed includes urine. I flush my pee down the toilet, which goes to the sewage treatment plant, which flows into the river, which again provides drinking water....

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