Over two years ago Amy Sharrocks started to collect water from volunteers who could bring their favourite or most meaningful sample of water to be remembered, creating Museum of Water. She is still currently touring the world collecting different types of water from different people with different stories. As The Guardian describes it, Museum of Water is about ‘Life death and the washing up in between’.[1] Indeed Sharrocks highlights how water is such an indispensable element although in the West it is often taken for granted and wasted, while people in other parts of the world still struggle to survive for the lack of water. She does that by drawing attention to water itself as something almost sacred and extinct to be preserved and remembered, by creating a museum-like project. Museums are usually a place of remembrance for something particularly precious or belonging to the past. We still have plenty of water and we have it off the tap; but for how long? Amy Sharrocks speaks in an era of climate change, waste and inequality.

 

Museum of Water’s form reflects its content. Indeed Amy Sharrocks displays a large amount of different water bottles and containers.  These reflect the number of differences around the world, multiple uses, tastes and preoccupations of people around the core element of water. And water is life, death and much more. Sharrocks plays with large numbers in her performance Swim as well. There she employs many people to join her intervention swimming across the water of London. The presence of large numbers reflects the broadness of the theme of water, the differences that exist amongst people and places and the large scale of problems caused by water’s unequal distribution and access.

 

Amy Sharrocks and I share the same love and apprehension towards water. Both of us are concerned about its scientific and almost philosophical importance for life /death but also our reliance on it for daily use. We both believe that water can tell stories about life and that it is something we shouldn't forget about. In Museum of Water the whole piece is basically telling stories through the means of water. I am aiming to tell refugees’ stories on water in an abstract and visual way. Sharrocks inspires me with her ambition to make Museum of Water an international work. In the same way I am trying to get in touch with refugees from different countries to talk about their experiences on water. We both think that water is something that unites everybody and that everyone should have it to survive. Following Sharrock's methodology, I have been trying to notice all my daily activities that employ the use of water, trying to extrapolate them from their context in order to make sense of some rooted habits maybe discovering more about the human need of water. It is studying her work and analysing water’s daily use that I became particularly interested in the water bottle as an object of research interest.​

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Sachiko Abe/ Cut Papers

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Sachiko Abe has been cutting paper for nine years as a healing process for depression and she has later started to make her paper cutting central to her performances. In her performances she cuts an enormous amount of paper curls which surround her, hang from the ceiling and fill the space. In Cut Papers - performed in 2010 at Liverpool Biennale - the sound of snapping scissors is the only way for the audiences to measure the passing time. The action of meticulously cutting is much focussed, looking like a meditation for the artist and the audience, being used as a healing therapy for Abe’s depression. Indeed watching this precise repetitive activity can be calming for the audience as well. Together with the dominance of white colour in the performance space –  due to the amount of paper collected over many years of practice and the fact that the artist wears white dresses while performing – Abe’s performances can feel very refreshing. In a fast paced world of chaos, anxieties and noises, Cut Papers creates a space with special rules where the flowing of time seems different and where the artist becomes subject and object of a particular kind of gaze of the audience, altering daily behaviour practices.

 

Abe’s interest lies in the form. Indeed she creates a special world for the audience to experience. Cut Papers’s plainness and its distinct sound of snapping scissors are very minimalistic, but the space is saturated with paper and dominated by the colour white. Whether this might result calming or deeply intriguing for the audiences, Abe affirms that her work is neither beautiful not meditational.[2] Indeed her focus is the circularity of gaze: the audience looking at her and her returning the look. Abe’s Cut Papers is inspirational to me, being her action of cutting paper very similar to my cutting of plastic bottles, both being very meticulous and focussed and both pieces durational. Her way of giving shape and life to a new world with its own logic, time and materials is deeply interesting to me and I am in the process of trying this method out with plastic water bottles and projection of water. I realised how empty plastic water bottles can be an interesting material by studying their functions and creative potential. One of the first actions I tried out was cutting them. It felt deeply engaging for me and I realised that it also creates beautiful shapes and interesting sounds that can transform the performance space in a totally different world.

 

Furthermore the fact that Abe’s work had been healing her from depression is interesting to me, being my cutting of plastic bottles a way for me to heal migrants' journeys and water unequal distribution’s effects and my precise and delicate movements of flowers a way to mourn the deaths caused by water.

 

 

[1] Nell Frizzell, ‘Welcome to the Museum of Water’, The Guardian (May 2014) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/22/museum-of-water-somerset-house [accessed 3rd April 2017].

 

[2] A Foundation, Sachiko Abe (September 2010) http://afoundations.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/sachiko-abe.html [accessed 3rd April 2017].