Andrea Packard:	Come on in everybody. I'm just going to start and people can trickle in. Welcome. I'm Andrea Packard. I'm delighted to welcome you all here for tonight's event. Some of you may be having a glass of wine or seltzer later and just be sure not to confuse it with the other beverages out there on the floor. Save your glass, we can maybe incorporate it into the artwork later. I direct the List Gallery, and have had the privilege of working with Stacy Levy for some time now. This evening is a very special evening not only for me and her, but for many, many people who have been working with us. As I was thinking about tonight's event, I was thinking about that old phrase, "We live in a world of our making.", that well worn mantra of 20th century constructivism takes on new meanings in this time of climate change. As many of you know, scientists are amazingly referring to our times as Anthropocene, a time in which human industry has fundamentally altered the geology of our world. Many artists today and curators and artisans and others, are asking what is the role of the artists in the face of climate change and how can creativity help us overcome those habits of seeing, that have helped lead us into this ecological crisis. 
	What can be done to reawaken our connection to nature, and how can we move forward in greater harmony with both nature and society? It's really exciting to encounter a relatively new sphere of artistic practice, which many people refer to as environmental art, and which is represented so well here today by Stacy Levy. Thanks to a very generous grant from the William J. Cooper foundation, we're able to bring Stacy Levy here to talk with us tonight about her career and also about her two major installations on the Swarthmore campus. For she is a paragon of environmental practice, a nexus of creativity that combines design, ecology, civic engagement, education, and dare I say, merriment. You laugh, yes. Merriment, because you cannot be faint of heart or faint of spirit in this practice whether you're on a ladder in the snowstorm or facing the daunting prospect of climate change. Levy's warmth and generosity, her inclusivity and social intelligence, are talents that you don't often recite from CVs. You don't see them there, but they are critical to her work and to this kind of practice. For those who think of artists as the mythic misanthrope and the addict, this is not the right way of working for them.
	Stacy Levy's artworks are not objects shipped from her studio to whichever site and plopped there like so much merchandise. Instead they are true collaborations with our community, our spaces, and of course with nature. Today in the List Gallery we're celebrating the completion of her installation titled Waterways. She mapped the Crumb Creek watershed using thousands of vessels rescued from our collective waste stream. After this talk you can help complete this work, I wasn't kidding actually. You can take off your shoes if you like and you can find your watershed address and put a red dot there if you wish. We're also putting the finishing touches on Crumb Creek Meander, the 300 foot long sculpture. Please, come on in, children welcome. 300 foot long sculpture on Parrish Lawn, which has already been tested to be child friendly and adult friendly as well. This enormous form reflects and animates some of the myriad forces in nature that we all too often forget. As I hope you will discover, it really becomes utterly transformed as the surrounding light and weather changes. You can see it emerge from the fog bank or sparkle at night like a vision from A Midsummer Night's Dream. You can plunge into it and explore it's [inaudible 00:04:51] and you may find it's about ten degrees warmer at it's center down slope. 
	Do you allow yourself very often to go off the asphalt pathways? We invite you to go there and see if you don't emerge feeling more at peace and engaged in wonder. Such ambitious projects were made possible through the Cooper Foundation and a collaboration between the Department of Art and the Scott Arboretum. I especially want to thank Claire Sawyers and Jeff Jabco and Bill McGuire who were among the many people who provided vital support. Stacy is outstanding in her field, in part because she's good at getting us to stand out there with her. The people I just mentioned are not alone in helping her. When I say we were out there with her, I mean a lot of people who are here tonight, and I hate to put you on the spot. I wonder if you participated in one of these two projects would you mind rising and just showing us that you're here. I can't name all of you tonight but I know there's at least a dozen people here. Thank you for your help. There are many more who are outside or doing other projects related to this as we speak. Thank you all.
	I just want to end by sharing a little bit more about the artist who many of you already know as renowned for using industrial or manufactured materials to focus our attention on natural processes. Some of her recent projects involve redirecting water runoff to reduce erosion or to remediate pollution. Other works invite viewers to become more aware of water quality and water flow in diverse environments ranging from mine drainage to urban streams. Stacy Levy graduated from Yale University with a BA in Sculpture and a minor in Forestry. She earned an MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1991. She also studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her awards are numerous and just to name a few, she's received the Excellence in Estuary Award, the Public Art, Ear, and Review Award, and grants from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and also grants from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, among many others. Her many public art commissions have been seen at divers sights around the world, including at a wetland park in Nigata, Japan, Lake Fayetteville, Arkansas, Scottsdale, Arizona, Hudson River Park, New York, and the Delaware River, Philadelphia. She is recognized worldwide and treasured locally as the best person to work with and speak with, and for good reason. It is a great pleasure, as well as an honor, to introduce to you Stacy Levy. 
Stacy Levy:	Thank you. I have to turn myself on here. I think I'm audible. Come in, hey. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure working here at Swarthmore. Andrea is one of those dream curators who supports you in whatever you're doing and then grabs you right before you fall off the edge of the branch you thought was going to hold you. It's been extraordinary to work here with her. It's so very important to have an entire community that you work with. I don't do work that I do in my studio and then have shipped with white gloves and delivered to the studio. We're out there with rubber gloves and neoprene and everyone has to pitch in. Some of the dirtiest work gets done even by the curators. It's a hugely collaborative effort. It does take a village to put up this kind of work. Sometimes I feel a little guilty that everyone has to put out so much, but in order to make a space and not to make an object. It takes a great number of hands and a great number of skills. A lot of emotional support for all the times where things go slightly wrong. 
	We have been very, not wronged by the weather because you can never be wronged by the weather, but it has been quite a challenge being the coldest and snowiest winter in a long time, which should be incredibly heartening. With global climate, I grew up with knowing it as global climate warming. It's global climate change or global weirding as some people have called it. The sense that it can get cold again somehow, it felt sort of like maybe the world wasn't ending quite as soon. I know I'm a fool for thinking that but it did give me that sense. To have the snow back felt somehow that maybe we hadn't ruined everything quite as quickly. Unfortunately, I'm sure the hockey puck rise in temperature will continue and we'll be back to business. Unfortunately, I also contribute to that though. I'm an environmental artist or an eco-artist. I drive everywhere. I fly everywhere. I burn a tremendous amount of carbon. I have a gigantic triple E sized 12 carbon footprint. That is always a problematic thing as an artist who talks about nature but that does not always walk the walk, because of the nature of making work in this world. 
	That's a conundrum that I'm constantly dealing with. I knew a team of artists in London who said they never drove anywhere and they never took airplanes. They did lots and lots of work and were very successful but they lived in London so that was easy because they could take trains to wherever they needed to get to. It's harder in America. It's harder where I live way out in the Hinterlands but it is a conundrum in this day and age. Sometimes I feel like the messenger who also is making the same mess back at my own house. It is an interesting thing that must be dealt with as an environmental artist and as an artist in general wondering, is this really important work? Is this really essential for the world that I go out and illustrate what's happening? Those are questions that I'm constantly driving to site thinking about. 
	Some of you know my work. Some of you are here, very delightfully, from places like state college and have seen me working but don't always get to see the finished product. Many of you have been deep in the work and gotten quite dirty doing it and probably haven't seen what I do at other times. The beginning of this will be a sort of tour of some of the jobs that I have done and then we're going to get into a more, yes thank you for the lights, another tour of what's going on, on this very campus. Hopefully we should move ahead. This is when you wonder, why when pushing a button does not get you what you need. Okay. Sorry. We've gone. One of the things I'm really interested in is the idea of interacting with nature. I don't just want to picture it. I actually want to collaborate with it but nature is not easy to collaborate with. She has her own ways of doing things and has very little regard for me as a human but sometimes if you find the right materials in the right place you can have extraordinary interactions. 
	I am not interested in the interactions that scientists have with nature where they record things on graphs and look at them and can stand back from them and say, "Huh, how about that. Look at that change. Here's a change in stream velocity." Well I can't get this. I don't know the water is changing in any way. I can't feel the level change. I need a clearer drawing of it. That's what I go out to make, projects that show people who are walking past these things what's going on with the very piece of nature that may be running through their college town and under their street. In this case, this is Easton, Pennsylvania with Lafayette College supporting this project that was done, lots of projects throughout the city of Easton. It's showing the Bushkill Creek in its different moods at typical water and then at high water. This curtain responds to it. It responds sort of with three different calligraphy's of response. It either hangs down or it hangs in a curved C or it hangs in an L shape. There it is at low flow. 
	Those are old buoys actually that are painted a kind of policeman's uniform blue. There it is in storm flow. That happened to be an extremely wet summer and there was a great deal of rain that was coming down the Bushkill. There it is at this sort of post flood stage, which always reminded me of a sort of post-coital moment of smoking a cigarette for the stream, because it would be high but very, very calm. It was interesting, I had never noticed that. It wasn't until I put these beads out on the water and that they drew something for me that I had any real understanding of what that stream was doing. Interesting things happen too. Patterns of erosion started to happen. The paint job on the buoys started to be eaten away, and they were eaten away in a very specific way. I knew how specific because I had walked across this creek many times and sort of fallen in the deeper parts, gone up to my neck and then you'd be back to your waist. I knew where the deep areas were, and it turns out that they accurately reflected by the erosion. 
	The stream bed profile was mirrored in the height of the erosion on this piece. The piece was actually ...The stream was drawing an image of its own self onto my artwork and I was very delighted by that. One day that will probably turn into another piece but quite unexpected too, sometimes nature collaborates in ways that you had no anticipation of and often far better than anything you would come up with. I've always been very interested in urban tides. I grew up in Philadelphia on the Schuylkill, which has a six foot tide. I had no idea. I got a chance to work on the Hudson river on a project, sorry Bob, I don't know when this is going to be built, a project that is still in prototype but we've prototyped it out. It's tide flowers. It's out on the Hudson River. We're waiting for our ... we have piling issues right now but this is the typical way that people understand the tide. It goes up. It goes down, and nobody in the city, particularly in Manhattan, really knows when it's going up. I don't really know when the Delaware is going up or when the Schuylkill is going up or down.
	I think it's very important to have these indicators that are showing you what's going on right there in the place instead of a map that you can get, even if you can get it as an app on your iPhone now, it still isn't comprehensible as a flower that blossoms at the high tide and then kind of closes at low tide. This is tide flowers open at high tide and close at low tide. This is us putting it up in the river using pneumatic tools that could be used, hydro-pneumatic tools that could be used in the water, which was very interesting. A lot of people have wondered what is an artist who loves nature doing with these kinds of colors, these bright almost hideous to some, colors and materials that have nothing to do with nature. I remember getting off the phone, or being at a phone meeting and I could hear the head of the arboretum in the background saying, "Oh, not the lady with the bright colors." Some people just detest it. 
	I myself, having worked many years in the forest, know why tools have red handles and why surveyors tape is pink, because these other things can get very lost in the forest and being a slightly dunderheaded person, I can't find the subtlety and so I need something to be quite bright and findable. Also the colors of indicators, the colors of your speedometer needle and things that tell you that something is changing. I've always been interested in these kind of indicator colors, an early project all about wind was using this wonderful day glow orange as a compass rose. I use a lot of materials that aren't typical sculpture materials. When I say I'm an artist they say, "oh what are your materials?" I'm like, "Bathroom sinks. Surveyors tape." It's hard to say. I don't use typical things. These are surveyors materials that are used so you can drive over them and I quite love them and they look great with apples too. Using things like fishing buoys that have been painted. Fortunately these keep getting reused because their recycling value is very low. 
	I do love the idea of the industrial meeting the natural. If you look at a place like the Bushkill Stream Corridor, it's this amazing mini-Venice where the water is winding it's way through all this architecture of the city structure. I love where nature meets the built structure and I think that it gets ignored at those junctures and that's the kind of nature I'm very interested in. Not the Grand Teton kind of nature, which does very well without me. These are the sort of materials that I take in order to mark a phenomenon that I haven't really understood like level in the forest. I'm also quite into these kind of more subtle things. This is why I loved studying with Winfred Lutz who's here today. Thank you for coming. She really was able to allow me and make me focus on these subtle changes, like where the seed machine drops one too many seeds and you get a greener ... Maybe that was more nitrogen got dropped along that line, but it makes a line in the landscape that you have to deal with and content with, or lines that are drawn by nature itself. Lines that show you where the wet is because the red-stemmed dogwoods with their brilliant tips are growing along the wet stream, which is actually how we find the water when we're looking for it for the project that's out here is looking for changes in vegetation. 
	Things that accrue, simple things like Ginkgo leaves that accrue and make an entirely different space for about three days in the fall and how that changes your sense of place. This actually is the driveway to the big prison out by us looking golden and lovely, and the idea of seasonal change and ways of capturing that so that you can see the same thing over and over throughout the seasons and see those differences as they happen. That form that nature takes too of the combination of meander and vortex that I simply love. Noah has gotten much better at projecting it and creating a visual map of. This is this amazing map that Noah has of wind currents across all land masses. I'm always trying to embrace that kind of form, which is shared by both atmosphere and water, which I think is so interesting that this fluvial forms are actually wet and dry. I like to play with that idea a great deal. 
	I've always love capturing the wind in-doors and out using strange materials. Sometimes very temporary materials here. These are lens papers for my ophthalmologist glued with flour glue to the rock because they could only stay there for a day. This was in Haystack up in Maine. I've also been extraordinarily interested in the rain. It rains a yard every year in Philadelphia, a little less out by where I live now. When it comes down it seems to drop and we change our behavior a little bit and then the rain disappears. I really want to give the rain a place to go, which is something that modern engineering has engineered right out of rains life. It has nowhere to go except a pipe. I'm very interested I celebrating the rain and making places you might want to head to when it's raining. This is the Arboretum at Penn State when where it rains, it comes on the roof and falls through the project and into a map. There it is coming out of the scupper falling onto a map of the watershed. It's a watershed that reads both wet and dry and then sends it out into infiltration fields. There it is dry. 
	You can see those incredible meandering forms that you often see when you're flying over America and you see these beautiful silver ribbons, which still choke me up whenever I see them. I love to see these waterways and these fabulous patterns. I feel these patterns need to be more a part of our lives and not the perpendicularity of our lives, which is how much of our structures make our lives feel very 90 degree angles when all these other patterns exist and we should live with them more, including in our parking lots and in other ugly spaces where we spend a lot of time. This is a project on the Delaware river that was cut out of the parking lot and allowing an entire rain garden to happen there and to drain into another rain garden. In this case, inviting the weeds in, the enemy of my enemy is my friend in this case. People I wanted the hardscape to disappear. I know that weeds are particularly hard on a hardscape and so I invited them to come in by giving them spots where they could come and then slowly break down that hardscape with their freeze-thaw cycles and their roots expanding through, so slowly eating away the concrete. 
	I know this will take more than my lifetime to actually accomplish but the idea that you could sort of harness something that's already happening seemed very interesting in this project. This was the kind of person I was. I like to play in the mud and gave another person a chance to do that in the city. Also, here's a pathway, we reused all the rubble and created these gardens. That's the first season. I was worried it wasn't going to grow in. That's the third season. Actually in the end, the rubble protected the roots because people would jump from pad to pad so the roots didn't get compacted. That worked out extremely well, and also allowed us not to dump everything and take it to be dumped and be somebody else's problem. This is a project that was done called Rain Yard for the Schuylkill Center For Environmental Art. I mean, no it's not for environmental art. It's for environmental education but I threw the art in there. 
	It's a piece that is for both people and for rainwater and giving a home for the rain. Here it is, this sort of outdoor classroom platform where you could ... The rain was allowed to soak in underneath, underneath the structure that was for people. It was a way of giving rain more space than it's usually given, and giving people a more confined space. It was a lot of fun, a place where you could sort of hover over the plants and the plants then would be uncompacted and undistressed and the mushiness of would be allowed to have its time, because rain needs not only a place, it also needs time to soak in. People don't want to give their landscape over to that. We want to have too much of the landscape and we need to share a little bit more. It ends up being a very fun and interesting place where kids can play in the water and squirt each other and also perhaps learn a little something about different materials. Here it is going through a few seasons, there it is in fall and in the snow, which was great to see it. I love the waterfall crystallized into ice. 
	This pattern, this spiral, has always been extremely compelling to me and I am not alone in that. This is Robert Smithson. I call it the Mona Lisa of environmental art because every time someone talks about environmental art, they talk about this particular piece, which is gorgeous though it is in the environment. It is not of the environment. It's not actually doing anything. I felt somehow that I needed to do a little something with my art and that maybe my earthworks needed to work a little bit more. I was doing some work with floating wetlands, with bio-habitats down in Baltimore and I thought, "Wow", usually they're in this kind of floating mattress forms. I thought, "What if you took it and turned it into another form and took the processes that those mats are doing, which is purifying the water, and you turned it." This is the problem of most of these lakes is there's all this run-off from new lawns and in this case old chicken farms, a big problem in Arkansas where this piece was. Anytime you turned the soil over you're turning a lot of phosphorous up and it runs right into the lake. 
	This is typical, these kind of floating mattresses, of treatment, very engineered, very functional, very boring to look at, and the typical engineering solution. I always think that combining engineering with art is really where it's at and there's a great deal of possibility that has yet to be explored about taking these processes in account and creating them with new forms, not the engineered forms, but the artistically engineered forms. Here's the project, it's a big .... It's quite big and it has about 7,000 plants in it. It's floating out there taking up nutrients through the plants roots and with all the periplankton growing on the roots too are absorbing the nitrogen and the phosphorous. These juncus effusus, a native grass, is put in all these holes. It's kind of like a big piece of Swiss cheese, and then it floats because the mat is quite buoyant. It floats out on the lake itself. We're towing it out with our kayaks there. One of those guys was an Olympic kayaker and boy could he tow. There it is. 
	Out there in the Smithsonian glory of being an homage to Robert Smithson but actually taking it so instead of being basalt rock and gigantic, it's made out of a very flexible and floating and growing sub straight. It's a new take on an old design. There it is again. The fishermen love it because it makes great fish habitat, and it makes great bird habitat too. It will get better as it grows in and be more shady. It's not perfect for nesting yet. There it is growing, sort of getting fuzzier and fuzzier. It's recently been adopted by the local watershed commission on that lake and they'll keep it out there. Originally I was going to just have it adopted. This idea of adoption and creating a piece that needs to be adopted or needs to have a second life is very important to me where these pieces go. I think I had experience with a flower show and I saw that get knocked down. I used to work for someone who took the plants and took them to the prison nursery because there were so many plants and otherwise they were going to go in the dumpster. I think you always have to be very attentive when you do temporary work to, where are your materials going afterwards? 
	Another of my homage moments was looking back at Baroque Gardens, which I used to hate. I simply hated Baroque Gardens. I thought they were over controlling but I started to get more interested in them and I decided to make my own based on the pattern of Versailles and made out of completely new materials. This is under the space needle in Seattle, a temporary project. These are all made with waddles that are used for restoration and anti-sedimentation right under ... And also instead of being viewed from the Chateau it got viewed from the monorail, or if you paid more money you could get it from the space needle. In time the natives grew on site and then they were adopted by other garden communities and taken away from the site. It was a temporary piece. It couldn't stay. They were taken to all sorts of other gardens and other places that needed native plants. It was like a stop along the way for the plants. There it was, the sort of scroll of mud left over which I actually really liked the look of. 
	That's what I've done. That gives you a sense of how temporary projects pass through the landscape. Here is the Crumb Creek Meander which you, I hope, will go out and see after you have some wine and feel fortified. It's a little cold out there but it is beautiful in the evening and it is made for all times of day and preferably all seasons too. I want to talk about how projects come about because you often see a project but you don't get to feel the blood, sweat, and tears of it. I'll just check on our time. We're still pretty good. Yes, it's very Cristo-esque. I really love Cristo and Sean Claude and I think the greatest things about his work, their work because it is a collaborative relationship, is about how it shows the typography of the place. I never knew Central Park in the same way until I saw it with the gates in it. I want to be able to do the same so that nobody looks at the landscape twice. I also have a very strong penchant to work with sensing water without using materials that are wet. It's very hard to work with wet materials and it's very expensive and the galleries are not suited for it. I often try and conjure up a sense of water using other strange man-made materials like these are actually gaskets from stop lights. 
	The idea of a whole made of smaller parts is always interesting to me. This is a beautiful piece. It's at the Exploratorium, that each piece is like a slice of that days tides and they all fold together and you see the overall year of tides. I so wish I made this piece but I did not. I did meet the man who made it recently. I thought of it. It's this beautiful piece. It's funny, I just saw it a couple of months ago and I realized, "oh it sort of has that curtain quality that I'm very into." I love when lots of the same stuff is all put together. This was at a market in Spain. I also love in the Guggenheim how it slices the space so there are these voids and then these sort of, I don't know, foregrounds. It makes this kind of stripey space out of big crowds, which I was very into. That's what I was trying to do in my own smaller way on the Parish lawn with this piece made out of vinyl, which is used for separating cold spaces from hot spaces. It's on the back of refrigerated trucks. It's in the back of cold storage places. Also, the dirty from the cleaner so your computer could be in one room and you're dusty studio could be in another. 
	The idea, it has a lot of threshold in it, which I like. That idea that you can move through spaces. You can move through something flexible like a wall. This is my son moving through something. There it is, if you look for it in the McMaster catalog, vinyl strip doors. It was bad to look up strip on the internet, let me tell you, but I did finally find my product. It is this, it's this very permeable thing and I love the idea of making a line that has a verticality but is also permeable. Meanwhile, while I'm having this love affair with vinyl. I keep seeing it everywhere. This is on the job site that I'm looking at. That used to be clear vinyl. Look at it now. It's just gathered up. It's like it's gathered up just hideous amounts of goo from the air. I love that too, that it's kind of a slide of everything that's gone on around it. Sometimes you find, people often say, "oh why are you using all that smelly awful material?", but sometimes it has an amazing delicacy to it. 
	These are boats that are wrapped at a marina. The way the shadows cast on the plastic or the vinyl fence and then the vinyl around the boats was striking and beautiful. I think we live with these terrible materials all the time and it's lovely to change their modes so you can understand something beautiful about them. You can see them function in a different way instead of just keeping the water or the sun off of your boat. They're also creating a sort of double tree for that area and that dendritic system is very visible. This is where I find that embracing industrial materials can be very important. We're going to have to live with them so let's live with them in a slightly different way. That's, I guess, in some ways, what this piece is about. I happen to think this material is fabulous. It's a little like antique glass. It's super durable, which is something that if you're collaborating with nature and collaborating with things like wind you really need it to be durable, and it will change over time. It's sort of affected by things. 
	I did, while I was in the midst of this, you keep seeing your piece everywhere. It's like when you buy a car and you just see the car you bought everywhere. I was at the Bates College Dance Program to see a performance and they're sitting behind these strips. I'm like, "What's going on here? Everyone's using this now." I'm very interested in the sort of visually permeable, the screen door that you look at the landscape through and how you can see through it but it's changed by being contained in that particular things and screens are buildings are interesting to me and how you can make very hard steel things into a kind of organic feel by having these ... having lots of them and bending them each slightly in a different way. 
	That kind of repeated form is something that informs me a great deal, probably because I really do come out of a minimalist tradition believe it or not. That kind of repeated form is very important to me. I always think of my works being like a raspberry where they're made up of lots and lots of little repeated things but it makes a whole, which seems to work as this one form, though it's not as delicious. Though somebody did lick the piece. This idea, these walls that are permeable that you can walk through but keep you from doing that for whatever reason, like the edges of fields. That's always an interesting thing, or the idea of a fence even though it's permeable can keep one kind of activity on one side such as mowing, and another activity, actually that's not mowing. That is AstroTurf on one side and a wild landscape on the other, which I always like that. There it is complimented by this incredible tower and trying to ... Catching whatever light it can and moving and bending, which I love. It's an industrial material that responds to nature.
	What I was responding to was the idea of the Crumb Creek. The Crumb Creek is this wonderful stream at the bottom of the campus that nobody ever gets to see unless you're intrepid and you hike down to the woods. I wanted to bring this creek up to people who were walking to dinner because I feel that people walking to dinner are very vulnerable to seeing things and doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do. I thought, maybe they'll walk through my piece if I put it between their classroom and their dorms or the dining hall. That's where the siting was. The idea of drawing a line on the landscape that somehow you had to interact with. That was the site that I kept gravitating towards on the Great Lawn here. Perhaps at one point there was a tributary that ran through here because there is no water up on this campus. Something would have had to drain this whole area, but it's no longer. It's a kind of memory of a possible tributary. That's me sketching in what I was thinking I wanted to do. I was already having a love affair with the vinyl and I thought, "Aha, here is the place for it. It should meander and it should be the creek. It's kind of liquid and it's kind of not." That's what got it going there. There it is. 
	In reality, not that dissimilar from the sketch, which always amazes me. It is this line that you can pass through but you can also allow to act as a wall. There I am. I'm drawing on Google Earth trying to figure out what that shape is going to be. How long is this thing going be, was a big question, and in the end, how much length can I afford? There it's me putting it into the map there. You can see Crumb Creek's [inaudible 00:36:59] has been stuck into the walking map, which I like, and to see how it would work in the space and working out a lot of sketching. I'm not a particularly good sketcher but I do a lot of it and it helps to sort of work things out. I was all about this idea of a boundary that you could make without putting something hard there. I was spending a lot of time in mosques because my husband was in Turkey and these bands, these circles of light that made the sacred space. They were above you but they made a space. I love that idea so I always want to try and make that in an everyday way. There's me making a little model and the sun is streaming through the model in my studio. I thought, "Hm, will that happen?", and it indeed did so that's always good when your model can tell you something you didn't know. 
	One of the things that's most important for anyone who wants to be doing this sort of thing is the concept that you have to go out and test it out in reality because you have no idea how anything is going to function until you've seen it in action and even then you still don't know everything. Here I am hanging my first set of vinyl on my barn and then it's checking it out in all sorts of weathers. Here it's snow. That was a couple of winters ago. Then taking it out to the field to see what it would do without a building next to it, more like the situation I had. Meanwhile, I'm traveling quite a good deal and I keep seeing this really amazing vinyl that's a different color. It's black and super reflective. That's my personal airport at state college. I love the fact that there's all this forest behind this sort of black axis mundi that's spewed out the luggage, but this reflective quality just had me floored so I knew I had to use some black in the project too. 
	There it is in my first frost, how it would change over time, how were these plastic strips really going to respond to nature? What were they going to do when different things happen to them? That's been a study, but I really have no idea exactly what's going to happen. I had some idea. There's my trusty assistant Fred, who's here today, we're testing all the things out like on the slope, how things are working on slopes. Once we have settled on this material we have to figure out exactly how much of it there is and we're buying it in these huge rolls. Fred did all the cutting of it and he set up this incredible measuring contraption, plus this kind of scotch tape dispenser from an old project actually, reuse of an old project, to create this thing. Look, it's like amber or something. That's a bunch of vinyl all rolled together. It's strangely a deep kind of blue and glowing day-glow too, which is always extraordinary. Then it becomes transparent.
	There it is laid out in all its piles that we're going to then take to Swarthmore. This is the bottom of my barn. Here is the pipe just before it's painted. It's been bent in Chicago. Not everyone wants to bend Schedule 80 steel pipe, which is an extra strong wall on this pipe so it can withstand the rigors of the wind. There it is in the shop. That was before it got painted. There's us touching it up after it's painted. We came upon this beautiful color. It's very hard as a sculptor to use color because we're trained, in my era, trained that everything would be black or white or gray and if it was a total failure you would make it red because that was how it would look acceptable then. To stray into these other colors is always interesting. I'm always looking for something that is telling me what color I might want to investigate and the kind of purplishness that trees get was a kind of purple that I was looking for that would have a glow in twilight but might blend in with the sky during the middle of the day. Matching that color was something we were after. 
	Then just the brass tax of it all. There's 1000 units of each piece of hardware that has to be used and each of them had to be painted because we were using these nylon nuts and bolts, so they're all getting painted in this, I think it's called Mystical Blue. There, if you may recognize that mat, which is being used to support the bolts while it's being painted, is from the wetland of an earlier project. There's a lot of reuse in an artist's studio for all sorts of reasons. I thought this was very beautiful too. There were lots of points along the way of making this piece that I kept thinking, "oh we should just stop here because this is the piece." I thought, "Wow, this is really beautiful. Why go on?" It might have been easier not to so we're testing out the hardware possibilities and testing the lighting. There was a whole lighting component, which you won't actually see tonight. We're going to come to a warmer opening in the future, which we will open the lighting. The electricians could not get in under the snow and it's been snow covered ever since we started. Here we are testing lights with various kinds of boxes and various lights and valances over to see what's working and that was too bright a light, that wasn't going to work. That's my husband there. These turned out to be the best thing. 
	I brought a number of my friends, who are here today, and asked them, "Do you think this is worth it, these little blue lights? Is this really worth it because we think it looks really cool?" Fred and I really like these but it was going to add something to make them happen, but we did drill ... In the end, we drilled the pipe so they would have this very mysterious blue light that emanates out of the bottom and will create a blue serpentine when you see it at night. I think having a night presence is really important in things because there are people ... I stay up pretty late in the night, that you should always look for your audience wherever you can find it. This is a college campus where people are pulling all nighters all the time and I feel they should be rewarded for their hard work when they come out in the middle of the night and there's a little blue light that only they have seen. 
	Here we are placing the poles which was done by a fencing contractor. At one point they moved the chair, the big chair. It put the whole scale off. It's very hard to decide. It's like, is that a Tonka toy with a normal chair or what? There we are moving. My camera is making everything look a little pink but I thought that was kind of a nice effect. This constant double checking of measurements and is everything online and is it all going to fit together when we need it to fit together? There we are. We had to paint the interior of the pipes, unfortunately after they were drilled but that's the nature of the beast. we had to cork everything. There's another great piece. I could have just stopped right there. It's beautiful. There it is arcing, dripping the paint out. That was another wonderful piece and probably should have stopped right there too. Here we are, there's Bethany putting the lights in. We had to thread the lights in. There was a lot of difficulty with the lights and Fred up on the ladder. Many people spent entire weeks up on the ladder. They got to sleep but that was about it. Drilling at high levels is hard. There are the blue lights that you will se one day.
	There we are unloading the vinyl from your UHaul and presented with a vinyl arc and a rainbow also, which was nice. There are prizes to working outside all the time. This is putting the vinyl on, which required a great deal of drilling and very special templates and a careful hand with Martha Perkins who did amazing work. Then we put them up. It took two people to put them up, each piece. They're about 13 per section. A lot of people helped. Crews up there helping hang the vinyl. I actually was away this day. I did learn that stepping away from your work sometimes is a really great thing and coming back is and it's mostly done, that was a pretty great feeling. There it is, setting this whole thing up and all this study to make something that could be activated by the invisible wind and make the wind visible again, or not again. To make it so it has a real presence. You wish for the wind to change. You wish for it to be a blustery day so that you can see it interact with this piece. There it is in it's calm state in a kind of misty, I think this is twilight because it's setting over the west, so the setting sun and how it's caught. 
	It seems so simple and it's such a sort of obviously and duh kind of thing to have a bunch of ... A curtain out there in the middle of the landscape, but it's extraordinary what it takes to get out there and function. I thought it was important for you guys to see some of the steps that it went through. There it is at night, lit by the ambient light in a wonderful way, very shimmery. We one of the greatest compliments you can ever receive is when somebody does a cartoon out of you and we are Swashmore. I couldn't tell if that was from Swag or Mt. Rushmore, the joke but I don't know. It's a good one. We'll quickly move on, very quickly, the Crumb Creek watershed and what the gallery was going to be was another way of looking at this watershed. You know it's 13 ways of looking at the Blackbird. I'm doing 2 ways of looking at the Crumb Creek watershed here. There I am with Fred laying it out in the most rudimentary, using 8 by 12 pieces of paper to see is this going to work, and creating a watershed map that would fit into the space. 
	They're getting our USGS maps all together because this is what we're going to use to find all this water. Then we're in search of this urban water. It's sort of suburban water here but it's waterways in the highly built environment under 476, a lot of it and in some more quaint areas too. There you can see Fred on the parapet of the bridge throwing a bucket in with a rope and then pulling up a sample. That's a 40 pounds worth of water bucket, pulling it up and then we'll put it in the car, see, there it is swinging down into another [inaudible 00:47:10] in the Crumb Creek and then putting it in the car very carefully labeled, because if this is mislabeled it's just like a wine collection, which becomes slightly worthless when you lose your labels. This holy water that you've worked very hard to get has a very particular label and it's going to go ina very particular place in the tributary itself so it's important to keep that absolutely known to all and there are the aquarians, the pourers of water, taking the water from each tributaries bucket and pouring it into the piece without a drop, because the floor was quite dry. It is protecting a floor below. They worked in a dropless fashion. They had a few dog towels just in case. 
	Pouring water is strangely soothing and a lovely act. It's interesting, even if it's filled with all sorts of sticks and debris. There is is with the texts on it that tells you were you are in the waterway and slowly filling up the map. That's the end of my talk about this. If you have any questions about either of these transparent pieces, I know some of you haven't seen the Crumb Creek meander, haven't been down to see it, but if you have any questions I'd be very game to answer anything. 
Andrea Packard:	Thank you, and thank you for coming.