God may have been willing but man helped the creek rise.

She often feels out of sync with the people of this place but she can read their life stories in the shards that wash away from them in the flood, just by holding them in her hands, and that makes her feel closer to them. Flash flooding occurs often where she lives. During the rainy season, raging waters move violently through the old suburban community and there is always damage. Her house sits on a hill so she has been spared so far, but the neighbors who live in the little crackerbox houses in the lowlands are usually less fortunate. Objects frequently wash out of their yards and are deposited at the bend in the creek at the back of her property where they snag on big rocks and cypress knees – and then they call out to her from the muck.

After the rain stops and the water recedes, she dons her wading boots, grabs her trowel and bucket and makes her way through the waterlogged field behind her house to retrieve the remnants she can scrape out of the mud to carry back to her studio. She digs out twisted and often unrecognizable offerings buried in mounds of sediment that end up in her slough after each storm. Despite what the city says, excessive dredging has not increased the capacity of the waterway or reduced flooding–instead and unfortunately, it has changed the landscape and killed aquatic creatures by speeding up the erosion process. She hasn’t figured out how to save the creatures, though she mourns their loss, but she does hope that by making art from the remnants she unearths that she might shed some light on what is happening in and around this urban watershed and encourage change.

She does her best to clean up her stretch of the creek but sometimes she sees things she can’t drag out of the water. Odd, ugly things like waterlogged mattresses and old broken toilets show up more than you’d think. Once she saw an oversized upholstered chair, like you’d see in someone’s living room, caked with mud and filled with rocks and silt that were scraped up as it tumbled downstream, perched high on a rocky overlook, lifted there by high flood waters. She’d seen floods scour out new channels through her woods, roll boulders, tear out trees, move a dumpster and car downstream and then, with the next flash flood wash them all farther downstream to some other rubbish graveyard in some other bend in someone else’s yard. Water is frighteningly powerful.

In undeveloped areas such as forests and grasslands, rainfall collects and is stored in the vegetation and soil and when those areas become saturated, the water moves toward waterways–slowly. In cities, where much of the land is covered by impermeable surfaces, the runoff to the creek is accelerated in size and speed and causes damage. Networks of ditches and culverts cut through the neighborhood by the city in the name of flood management don’t help. Because they reduce the distance and time that runoff has to travel overland to reach the creek, the water quickly exceeds the capacity of the ditches and overflows their boundaries, rushing fast and furiously through back yards and parks, over bridges and into school yards and fields, carrying away garbage cans, lawn furniture, clothes lines, and toys. And then, almost as quickly as the water rose, it recedes, leaving roads covered in mud, basements filled with water, and a creek-bed filled with debris – and stories.

She walks the littered creek bed year round and finds as many of the lost objects as she can. Sometimes she finds the remains of wildlife habitats and animals. Bones, feathers, crawfish claws and beaver sticks often end up in her gleaningbucket. Her gathering ritual is a compulsion born of curiosity and empathy for the inhabitants of her neighborhood and the waterway. She feels she is able to connect with them somehow by collecting the splinters, scraps and bones. It feels like a restorative act–or maybe an apology.

There have been studies that prove that objects that are haptically explored generate complex memories. She’s chosen to remain open to possibility and believes she is recovering fragments of memories. She carefully cleans and braids them together into small fetishes as a gesture of recompense. It feels like conjuring or what she imagines conjuring might feel like.

She knows found objects don’t tell whole stories but context and geographical location help her piece together bits of stories. She intuits, interpolates, deduces and weaves in characteristics of her own life experiences and the surrounding landscape and language to fill in the gaps. She works thoughtfully and deliberately with what she knows to be true. This is how the story of history is pieced together, she often thinks. This process certainly isn’t about drawing out whole truths or fixing what’s been broken but to her it feels like piecing together a kind of relative truth that carries good intention and sometimes beauty. When lost objects are taken out of context and combined with other objects with incomplete stories, they form a composite narrative, a rebus – something like a poem that marks points in time and space and connects us to the past and offers a little hope for the future.

She calls them Counterspells.