On Irland

The Basia Irland article both inspired and bothered me. Water is a critically necessary component of our bodies. We can live much longer without food than we can without water. Dehydration can be lethal...and yet, microscopically little water ever leaves our planet. The water remains almost exclusively within our hydrological system.

I love Irland's concept for the water sculpture, Poem for Yemanja. In fact, I felt that all the constructions and installations were powerful and I would have loved to be able to walk through Desert Tides. I admire, and maybe even envy, the dedication of time it took to complete this series. I do not have the physical or economic freedom to even consider doing a project of that magnitude. Yet in Poem for Yemaja, I had a difficult time reconciling the near-obsessive need to return the water to the original source.

Returning the water to the system in which it was removed seemed both poetic and logical-completely in keeping with the conceptual image of global waters. Where my difficulty comes in is the logic in the dispersal method. The effects on the environment via traveling to different areas to disperse the water seems somewhat counter to the concept of global water. Much of of the article flows around ritual and narrative within Irland's work so the dispersal method would make sense within that context. But the symbolic blending of these waters into one global community might have made the point more concisely (albeit less dramatically).