05-11-2024

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. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

This piece was created as part of an exhibit created by our friends at Talking Rivers called Listening to Water. The exhibit was held at the Brush Gallery at St Lawrence University and explored the rights of rivers with art and a series of events, we were honored to be included. I made this piece by creating a 48 hour recording of sound next to the Osgood River in Paul Smiths, NY and translating the resulting data into a pattern of color representing natural (blue) and human-caused (gold) sounds heard during that period. It was done in Tunisian crochet as individual pieces and combined with a 3rd color to ensure all the strips were the same length, then crocheted together as a wearable piece. More info in a blog I wrote about it here.