Water and its traces course through the art of Liz Ward. Water's fluidity recurs throughout the content and form of her work. At first glance, the drawings and paintings gathered within this exhibit may appear to be diverse examples of biomorphic abstraction. Beyond this relation to traditions of modern art, however, the works in Aqueous cohere as a clearly unified series of meditations on the nature of water, and on water's presence in and around us.
Ours is a watery landscape in which omnipresent fluids often remain undetected. Ward's art reminds us of the presence of water beneath the surface of living things, be they plant and animal bodies or the Earth itself. Water's presence marks the series of silverpoint drawings Tree Cell Studies (2004) and Cellular Seasons (2005). Each drawing freely recalls the complex cellular structures found within trees and other plants. As their stomata respond to the variable presence of water in the environment, plants mark the changing seasons at cellular levels. Seasonal changes in fluid flow mark growth patterns, leaving visible traces (such as tree rings) in a plant's physical structure.
These cellular studies expand Ward's long-standing investigation of tree rings and other art forms in nature. Throughout Ward's art of the past decade, water's presence is surpassed only by her subtle attention to temporal issues. Whether examining the immensity of geologic time, the rapidity of biological cycles, or the slow processes of fossilization, these works sensitize us to the ever-varying pace of life. By focusing our attention upon cellular activity, these series renew Ward's long-standing investigation of deep structures.
Nature's forms often remain hidden beneath the surfaces of living things. Deep below the crust of the earth flow streams and pools of fossil waters that sustain life. These aquifers appear in a series of recent watercolors. Evangeline Aquifer (2004) and Chicot Aquifer (2005) refer to these bodies of subterranean water that flow from eastern Louisiana to Galveston, Texas. Ward's own ties to this region run as deep as these aquifers. Born in Louisiana, she lived for a significant period in Houston, leaving to work and study in California, New Mexico, and France before returning.
Ward completed her MFA at the University of Houston, subsequently teaching there, at Rice University, and at the Glassell School of Art before moving to the San Antonio region to teach art at Trinity University. Ward's attention to the apparently impersonal forms of nature may harbor deeply personal elements beneath its surface, as the geography of these aquifers indicates.
Though unseen, aquifers affect us all. Without their ancient water, much of North America could not support the dense populations that inhabit it today. Aquifers offer a ready point of reference through which to evaluate environmental health. Because of the intense tapping of these fossil waters for our personal and industrial needs, we are increasingly dependent upon their recharge through rainfall. In transit to the aquifer, recharge waters pass through strata of silt and clay which were long believed to filter out pollutants. Yet, shifting layers of clay allow inadequately filtered waters to contaminate the aquifer today. Evangeline and Chicot aquifers run parallel to one another, overlapping as they stretch across the Louisiana coast, past Houston's ports and the "Golden Triangle" (of Orange - Beaumont - Port Arthur) to Galveston.1
This zone's severe industrial pollution may contaminate the water that millions use daily. A newspaper photograph reporting on the health of these water supplies inspired Ward to create the first works in the Aquifer series. Like her installations The Mesquite Line (2002-2003) and Angangueo (2004), the Aquifers relate "a color-driven narrative [that] expands over a vast geographic space."2 In the Aquifers, what we experience above ground has unseen effects below.
Dramatic geologies of riverbeds and canyons mark water's slow transformation of the landscape. Aquifers carve out similarly incremental geometries in their underground expansion. Concentric lines mark the processes of their slow and steady formation. These sculpted forms of nature give solidity and mass to the transient lapping action one experiences at the water's edge. The geometric expansion characteristic of an aquifer links these bodies of water and the artworks in Aqueous to Ward's broad address of incremental growth patterns throughout her art. Lapping waters of aquifers, pools, and waves; flowing cascades; the concentric growth rings upon a mollusk, and those marking the life of a tree; all are linked.
Ward's choice of watercolor and silverpoint mean that her creative process is necessarily labor-intensive, but not excessively so. She experiments with watercolor's uniquely aqueous properties in works such as Flow Mix (2003) and Fluid Exchange (2003).3
In Minor Aquifers (Pthalo Blue) (2005) and Minor Aquifers (Deep Blue) (2005), the concentric forms characteristic of aquifers glow with such intensity that these watercolors recall the banded colors of agates.
With silverpoint, a medium popular with the Old Masters but used rarely today, Ward introduces subtle color into her drawings.4 Using watercolor, Ward tints gesso to prepare the ground that silverpoint requires. As she draws with the silverpoint stylus, the precision of her mark-making is matched by its intuitive freedom. It is as if she feels each new line into existence, generated by the lines that have come before but also by an external force from nature itself. Drawing, for Ward, is an active engagement with the natural world: through the silverpoint stylus she puts empathy into action.
Because the uniform quality of the silverpoint line is unresponsive to changes in pressure or inflection, Ward likens it to the etched lines of intaglio printmaking. "This somewhat mechanical line quality gives a reserved, distant feeling to the drawings. … the lightness and delicacy of silverpoint suggest a ghostly quality in which images hover in an ambiguous relationship to ground. Straining to see the drawing, the viewer becomes aware of the act of visual perception itself."5
Although Ward chooses to revitalize media rarely embraced today, her investigation of vision and aesthetic experience as linked processes connects these works with a diverse range of contemporary artists. Her intimately-scaled paintings and drawings engage goals similar to those earth artist James Turrell pursues in molding the landscape on a large scale. Turrell's ruminations on light, the eye, and the brain apply as readily to a consideration of Ward's work in Aqueous as to his own Roden Crater:
We were really made for the twilight. It's that light that allows us to then have the eye open, and since I feel the eye is the most exposed part of the brain… we don't really start to feel with the eyes until that iris opens. The light has to be greatly reduced before the eye opens. This idea of the clean, well-lighted space, where we could trash paintings and things with thousands of watts of light, is not where we see best. It isn't until this light is greatly reduced and the eye is allowed to open that feeling moves out from the eye. That is the level of light that I make my work for, and that's where we begin to see light … with its existence as material as something you can physically feel beginning to occur.
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Ward's use of line, color, and subtly prepared ground, guides the viewer's optical experience so that one might learn to "feel with the eyes" and, in so doing, be aware of the processes of vision as they occur.
Without water, vision as we know it would not be possible. The aqueous humor of the eye (the thin layer of watery fluid between cornea and iris) shapes the eye while nourishing lens and cornea. As the title Aqueous indicates, these works together offer a meditation upon water that, ultimately, addresses the processes of seeing and the act of vision.
Over the past few years, Ward's art has ranged from the treatment of fossils to cells to fossil water, encompassing vast stretches of deep time and brief moments of contemporary experience. Her art recalls the poetic investigations into natural history by author and scientist Loren Eiseley. In The Immense Journey, Eiseley observed, "we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existence, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age."7 Ward's art is a sustained meditation upon the conjoined beauty of such transience and continuity across the long history of life on Earth.
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