Cast concrete, plaster, pigment, steel, aluminum, water

In collaboration with Aaron Alexander, UW-Madison

The path water takes as it flows over and through our planet depends on what holds it from below. How does rain interact with the soil of a well-tended garden, or the surface of a parking lot? Rain can cascade off a roof into the web of life below, or through a downspout into a sewer. What slows water?

This piece is part of a material study to understand the porousness of land. In response to urban hydrometeorologist Aaron Alexander’s work developing open source modeling systems that elucidate the effect of green infrastructure in cities on both hydrology and climate, the artist focused on intimate ways that water moves. Slow Pore is a casted model of a small section of the Yahara River, including parking lots, a bike path and brief edges of plant life that surround it.

The Yahara river flows within the Mississippi Watershed and is a thread that connects four of the lakes that make up Teejop, so-called Madison, Wisconsin. The Yahara flows through the ancestral lands of the Ho-Chunk people, and this concrete model depicts the channelized section of river that flows across the isthmus.

Using your hands or tools provided, pour water on the sculpture and note the ways water can move.