I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

Mirror Lake is part of our Adirondack Lake Assessment Program and has been the subject of intensive research by AWI and the Ausable River Association. This knitted and woven piece is a representation of the chloride levels recorded in the lake between 2015 and 2020, data collected as part of long-term monitoring efforts and which has been used to inform important road salt management efforts in Lake Placid. Road salt is a primary pollutant in some Adirondack lakes, with consequences for aquatic ecosystems and human health. The red sections in this piece tell the story of high chloride concentrations, which interfered with lake turnover during 2017, 2019, and 2019. Read here about the history of identifying this problem, the importance of long-term monitoring efforts like this, and the observed improvements in chloride levels that are resulting from management efforts informed by this work.

Made by knitting a plain stockinette piece and weaving the color pattern from the graphic into it.