Water Books
Sarah FitzSimons
Church, Tenna – GPS: 46.747537, 9.340010
These books are part of a water library I’m developing, and they are meant to be held and opened. For Tenna, I made one of the local river (Rabiusa), and one of the river’s final destination (Atlantic Ocean). With these objects I’m interested in thinking about global water circulation, the meaning of place, the emotional connections we develop with particular bodies of water, and the knowledge & poetry embedded in material, as opposed to text.
I experimented with sites where the books could be encountered, and felt Tenna’s church was an ideal contemplative place where people might sit and spend time with these objects. There’s also a connection between water and spirituality that interested me, and I thought of this passage: “All rivers flow into the sea, but the sea is never full; one by one the rivers return to their source.” Eccles. 1:7
Sarah FitzSimons (Cleveland, OH USA) has developed large site-specific sculptures for venues across the US and internationally, including the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Djerassi Foundation (California), and Vadehavsfestival (Denmark). She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.