How the Water Finds Us
Art Installation
Year:
2026
Timeframe:
1 Year
Tools:
Installation, Projection, Film
Category:
Creative Technology
Role:
Artist, Creative Technologist
Team:
Wellesley Studio Arts
Overview
How the Water Finds Us
This installation began with surfing — not as a sport, but as a method: being exposed to the elements with only the sun and tide as clock and compass. Drawing on years spent in the water along the California and Southern China coasts, the work moves past depicting surfing itself and toward the state of awareness the ocean produces — the way immersion reorganizes a body's sense of position, attention, and time. Built from fabric, projection, and film, the piece uses the architecture of the gallery to construct an environment that sits at the threshold between physical and cognitive sensation, where what a viewer sees depends on where they're standing and how long they've stayed there.
Two States of How
The thesis investigates how the water finds us, understood as two intertwined states. The first is physical: within water, position becomes relative to the water itself rather than to gravity or ground, the body becomes the instrument of orientation. The second is mental: the particular quality of attention that surfaces when the body is fully occupied and everything except sensation falls away. My goal was to build a space that didn't just depict this experience, but let a viewer arrive at it on their own terms, through navigation, stillness, and time, rather than through a single frontal image. I wanted the installation to ask the same thing the ocean asks: patience, presence, and a willingness to stay with something that doesn't immediately resolve.
How the Water Finds Us: Installation
The final piece is a site-specific installation combining fabric, projection, and film across two iterations of the gallery space in Wellesley College's Pendleton West. Fabric was hung and pulled into wave-like curves that established the room's physical logic before any image arrived, so the projections felt like they were completing something already present rather than being imposed onto it. Two projectors ran in conversation: one showing tide pools and shoreline water rendered vertically and up close, the other following surfers' bodies in slow motion; together moving viewers between the physical and mental states the thesis investigates. Cyanotype-based kelp imprints were placed on the floor, and bean bag seating was tucked behind hanging fabric to mark spaces meant for staying rather than passing through. Sound, ultimately the noise of sparkling water fizzing, chosen for its familiar but unplaceable quality, filled the room without directly narrating the footage, anchoring physical presence without pointing attention anywhere specific. Every material choice, from exposing cyanotypes to wind and sand to projecting through fabric rather than onto it, was made to preserve unpredictable, unrepeatable outcomes: a commitment to the moment that can't be averaged, and can only be met by the person present for it.
