Art and Science

When Art & Science Work Together

Hand-made Art
Creative Direction
Science Art

Drought is the slowest emergency there is. Paired with hydrologist Ben Livneh through the Colorado Art + Science Environment fellowship, I built a series of works on three kinds of drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin: meteorological, hydrological and snow. The science explains what's happening. The art is for the part of you that has to care before you'll act.

THE CHALLENGE
The Grand Valley drinks from the Grand Mesa and lives off the Colorado River. Everything here depends on snowpack that falls hundreds of miles away and arrives months later. Water science says this clearly. It just doesn't say it in a way that stops anyone. Drought data reads as normal until it's a crisis, and by then the decisions worth making have already passed. So the problem wasn't illustrating Ben's research. It was making a slow, invisible threat land on someone in the four seconds they'll give a piece of art.
THE PROCESS
I started with Ben's three categories, because the distinctions matter. Low precipitation is one thing. Low runoff into reservoirs is another. Low snow is a third, and it takes the ski economy and snow-adapted species with it. Three problems, not one. That became the structure. The visual decision was contrast. Each work sets drought against saturation through texture, color and iconography, so the eye has to hold both states at once. Absence only registers when you can see what's missing next to it. Then I took it off the wall. In an art and science workshop, we drew local places people love with water and without it, and let the gap do the talking.
THE SOLUTION
A three-part series that turns a hydrology briefing into something with a pulse, and a workshop format that puts the brush in someone else's hand. Ben's read on it stuck with me. A visual forces hard choices about what to show, and in return it reaches people a paper never will. People came to look at art and left talking about their own water use. As neighbors here say, when it's low we know. The work just moves that knowing a little further upstream.