Project Overview

This interdisciplinary sculpture, performance and video project explores the entanglement of nature and society on the Kennebec River in Maine. In this piece, I sought the guidance of others who held particular knowledge of the river, and traveled with these “Project Guides” for a day in a boat I built for this purpose. Project Guides held different perspectives on the river, and included a campground owner, an historian, an octogenarian environmental activist and fisherman, one of the state's only woman Registered Maine Guides, a philosopher, a fiddler, and a literature scholar. The collaborative and contextual methodology was employed to challenge the modernist idea of the artist as a solo agent of invention and action, and to challenge the individualistic basis of American human/nature relations.

The project title is inspired by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus' observation that one "cannot step in the same river twice." That is, one’s understanding of a place is an accumulation of contingencies—the perspectives of the people there, the shifting nature of the site’s ecosystemic and physical properties, and the method of interacting with it.