What’s in the Water?
Mixed media installation
Digital photograph, glass, wood, acrylic paint, wooden table,
wooden rocking chair, sheer curatains, paper, quahog shell, abalone shell,
white sage, pepermints, rug
2024
What’s in the Water? transforms my grandmother’s home into an intimate dwelling space shaped by memory, stewardship, and intergenerational care. Using archival imagery, furniture, shells, family photographs, sound, and domestic objects gathered from my nana’s home, the installation recreates the familiarity and emotional texture of entering a lived family space. A welcome rug, rocking chair marked for my nana, family photographs, and carefully arranged objects invite viewers to move through the environment not as spectators, but as guests entering a space of reflection, responsibility, and remembrance.
Designed for intimate encounters, the installation includes chairs for viewers to sit, slow down, and dwell within the work. The space asks visitors to consider questions of legacy, care, environmental responsibility, and what is carried forward across generations. At the center of the installation, a large archival photograph of offshore wind turbines viewed from ancestral Wampanoag coastlines becomes a reflection on ecological transformation and future accountability. Seen through a white-framed window, the turbines shift the comfort of home into a space of questioning and reckoning.
A voicemail set in the future plays within the installation, carrying a conversation between generations and asking what responsibilities we hold toward the land and waters that sustain us. The work reflects on the ways home functions as archive, vessel, and site of teaching—holding memory, grief, love, and continuity simultaneously.