Wedding Water
returning to the source
Last night's snow storm has sculpted drifts, embellishing all things exposed to the north with backbones and tails to the south. No longer stones and branches, or materials we should have put away, now a seamless landscape. Snow has once again made everything whole. This seamlessness was a big romance of mine in the years I lived up north, in Sápmi. Where the softening of edges touches everything, from the breathtaking landscape to the most brutal of arctic architecture. Even the mountain of tailings from the world's largest iron ore mine is cloaked for most of the year in snow. I went north to sculpt ice and lived for some years by the Torne river together with a man named Mark. We would cross the frozen river, a kilometer wide, to work on the other side, to work with ice from the river. Shaping a reflecting, sublimating, melting matter until it became river again in the late spring.
I was following a ice dream that began with making sculptures in a supermarket freezer in lutruwita Tasmania. Completely captivated by making things that shapeshifted and that I had no control over, my first installation of suspended ice sculptures was both a success and minor disaster. The glass jars underneith didn't quite catch all the drips and some made their way through the gallery floor. Then an art school colleague heard on the radio, something about a hotel made of ice in Sweden. I already had plans to travel to Estonia, so I wrote to Icehotel, got a job and ended up working there for seven seasons.
When I was a budding artist, finishing high school in Beechworth Australia, feeling my way into what my work was about, I had three things in mind: water movements, the body as nature and death as metamorphosis. I was completely unaware at the time that the place where I was born and lived was originally known as Barmootha, 'place of many creeks' by the Pallanganmiddag nation, I didn't even know I was living on Waywurru country. The history of our town, as far as education in the 1980's and 90's was concerned, began with European explorers, followed by the gold rush, in which some 120 tonnes of gold were extracted from the land and waterways of the area in mid to late 1800s. My Great-grandfather, a jeweller and watchmaker, had a shop in town in the early 1900's. I grew up in his granit house with cupboards full of watch parts and broken jewellery, wonderful treasures in my eyes.
In the old outdoor toilet was a stack of dusty wooden boxes, full of semi-precious stones; smokey quartz, jasper, agate and others. I mostly left that place alone to the red-backed spiders. My Great-grandfather collected and tumbled some of the stones - a noisy business that had either made him deaf or was bearable because of his deafness. I imagine prospectors might have brought them to his shop when there was no gold to be found, or perhaps he walked the creeks looking for them himself. Visiting this house for the last time a few years ago, Esmilda and I washed all the rocks, discovering the colours under the dust, we wondered where they came from and how we could take them home again, not to Sweden but to their home.
I got in touch with a Dhudhuroa elder and we met at Woolshed falls. Sitting on the sun-warmed, water-shaped granit by the creek, we talked about how and where to make a ceremony to return the stones to country. We've still yet to do this, on my next trip back I hope. I offered him a huge smokey quartz as a seed of this intention. At one point in our conversation I had made a comment about stolen land and stones, to which he replied so simply and disarmingly ''if it's given back, it's no longer stolen''. Imagine if we were to return all that gold to the land, and that land to indigenous people. If the iron roots extracted from Kiruna were returned to the ground, if that land was returned to the Sámi. If we could make like water and return to the source.
La source, in French, is the spring and I am walking to the one in the forest to collect our drinking water every few days, accompanied by the vision of Vatt-Anna. It has me reflecting on the water cycle of my life. When I lived in Poikkijärvi by the Torne river, I was walking on water and working with water inside a building made of water, nearly everyday. During this time the obvious seeped into my awareness with such a felt sense. Spirit is in the water – water is spirit – or god if you prefer. Miracle upon miracle, water is life.
I wrote this poem in 2020 as a kind of water medicine, for the third anniversary of Mark's death and for my love of the river. I read it later that year during ANTENN sound art festival in the old water tower. It was in the midst of Covid so we couldn't have a live audience, instead thirteen artists gathered for a day and a night of lament in resonance of the water tower and the recording was streamed. Our laments were instrumental, electro-acoustic, vocal, experimental, improvised and dedicated to water. I read the poem with vocal accompaniment while pouring the water a friend had brought me from the Torne river.
I wed myself to you, river before I came to you, Torne River Duortnoseatnu, I made you my lace fish tail sitting for hours and hours, in the apartment window in Turku counting, counting, fingers deftly moving this small boat shaped shuttle tatting knots on copper wire, with scales open to let sea-through after 2 months complete, I wore my tail and was on my way North, I made myself a mermaid for you when we first met I skated on your thin ice dancing, while the locals regarded with apprehension that you may with this first touch consume me your skin was thin as was mine with a chainsaw we cut you sleeping open drawing with metal claws a tomb-like lid that I could lay my tail inside you, to be shaped by you and caught in your slowerly flow drawing your door closed again, I waited and waited the sun left us for weeks and weeks, auroras flamed and snow dance down down soft down, hard cold, crystal crack and echo that new year's at -40° I crossed over to your other shore and blew soap bubbles that froze I stayed for months and shaped your waters with chisels and your waters, they shaped me with the sweetest sound of crystalline waterfalls shedding over my gloved hands in your reflection I realised my body's water was yours and to your sweetness I fed the salt of my tears then my or your tail, we cut it out with a blade one meter long we levered out a block of you, crushing in its weight, waiting my shed skin held tight in your stone water, still-dancing river weed and fish bubbles transparent suitcase of slow living light, a gift of the uninvisible that I then left in the Icehotel to melt, to be met by the prince of Monaco and many many ski-suited tourists though impartial you must be, as we are all your children I left before you melted and left my tail with you I had hoped that someone would catch it, but they missed... perhaps you carried it towards the sea or caught it on your rock bottom either way, my tail is yours, unravelling with time I didn't know that I had wed you I went home to the other side of the earth but you drew me back to love a man I thought I wouldn't I moved in with him and I slept beside you do you remember our wedding on your ice? I swept you in preparation, a boat-shape clear and dark in the snow in the goahti just beside, our Sámi friend Lars Henrik grilled reindeer for the feast and dressed in stockings 'n seal skin with painted face and stick in mouth Elizabeth danced the ferocious seductive grotesque Greenlandic mask dance I too was dressed in seal skin dyed black, with a single stripe of silver fur a vertical passage my heart to you, down my center to where you lay all the guests got much more or less drunk on moonshine but in that moment when one should say yes, fireworks had gone off at the right kind of wrong time... I didn't know that I had wed you as I lived on your shore for 4 years until our human marriage dissolved, we parted and I moved together instead with the man who had set off the fireworks years later the man I had married died and grief returned me to you to say goodbye to him, I made a small boat of skin that we mourners filled with small messages for t/his passage we heart-chanted in a big circle on you, just aside of where we'd wed gathered around a heart-shaped hole cut through your ice in the center, the boat and messages floated at first, then duck-dived down and sank as bubbles rose with a sprinkling of his ashes later when all the guests had left I took from my pocket my wedding ring from space, a meteorite cut and lined with gold, let it linger on your surface a moment, before dropping it to your depths in unwedding a wedding I wed myself to you river, at last I understand I wed myself to your depths that flow through all seasons to your water spirit that is transformation I wed myself to you, river
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So many stories within this story, all so moving in the way you honour Water, Earth, Spirit and love. Thank you .
This is just too incredible. What a beautiful mind and heart you have. All i want to do is swim now that I have learned to let water have its way with me.