Water is one of those substances that appears to be alive. So much so, that scientists have conducted studies to prove it.

While visiting with John Mendelsohn in NY at his studio, this conceptual approach towards water as a kind of living material, became a part of our conversation.

It’s through this fascination with water as a substance, a vibrant material, that I find myself connecting to this new object oriented materialism as a thinking trajectory.

…to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things…My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans. Preface Of Vibrant Matter.

As a reference, Janet Bennett and her book Vibrant Matter took our conversation during our visit to a more “thing” focused understanding of the dynamics of reality.

Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even “respect.”

By exposing the life-like qualities inherent in “common place things,” “physical phenomena,” and the “power of material formations,” towards a contemporary focus on re-envisioning the nature of materials and matter, ecological thinking is taken to a place where human agency becomes a part of the dynamics of our world and not its ultimate focus.

It’s this potency, the power, force, energy and vital qualities that are associated with water, that as an artist, I have felt inspired to study visually through these artworks as a creative series of discoveries. In this sense, my objective stands alongside the author’s to enliven inanimate matter.

Jane Bennett’s interest in presenting the argument that matter is more than “inanimate” considers that this particular perception “may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption.”

My aim as an artist is to capture creatively through my work those awe inspiring qualities that are inherent to water as a substance that we all depend on to be alive.