Hannah Mitsu Shimabukuro

Origins, June 2016
photograph, straw wattles, plaster
72 x 72 x 6o in.

Water and sediment. Water as sediment.
Sediment as memory. Sediment as object?

The power play between an unpredictable force and the things that get in the way. The origin of islands. The attempts of people to direct water, to slow erosion, to fix their mistakes. Trash as history. Bodies of water as personalities. Roni Horn describes the opaque river water “as a soft entrance to not being here,” a dismembering of the body that attracts the suicidal and scares off children. And that can be some rivers. But I know the range and potential of water. The freshwater crack in a field of lava, an ocean channel, mixing river deltas, the backside of a waterfall, quarries. I use water to see but water has its own needs, it finds my hands as its own outlet. We play. I imagine the straw wattles water might want, I imagine water as my skin. I wonder what happens to water when I lend myself as a filter, what happens to me when water decides to disappear.