This website is designed to publicly share my learned experiences in spaces where water and communities meet and do not hold over time, but instead renegotiate, make and unmake one another, interact to form new unexpected possibilities. Over 25 years I have spent time on rivers, islands, lakes, and coastlines with international agencies, government officials, and local communities learning about their self-described water relationships. These spaces hold the potential for reimagining futures that effectively weave together multiple, simultaneous traditional, contemporary, and speculative worldviews. I do not believe that one way of knowing is enough to describe and confront planetary challenges. As the planet's climate alters and what we understood about water becomes more variable and more unpredictable, we need everybody in this moment.

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I attempt to honor the communities within which I work with opportunities for co-design, co-creation, and co-production. The result is often stories told by combining science to measurement and describe with photography to humanize and maps to geospatially document. Through the use of digital mapping software (GIS), I create maps to highlight visual intersectional overlaps. Analyzing and describing complex water, climate, and community interdependent systems requires complex methods and tools. None of these communication tools or research methods tells a complete story in isolation, just as no one epistemology or ontology is complete for describing complex interdependent earth and social systems.

 

As an academic, I work to support students to explore their curiosity in rigorous and innovative ways in the classroom and in their research projects. As an artist, I explore various mediums to problem solve, express, and create. In both cases, I am attracted to work in borderlands, liminal spaces, contact zones where multi-dimensional generative realities and worldmaking are active. I am drawn to these sites of encounter where distinct worlds meet and reshape one another because they are hard to pin down, unsettled, entangled, dynamic, inspiring, and open. I engage with this research not to resolve, but to stay with their tensions. 

 

​These pages offer an example of my work, both as an academic and as an artist.