After working in film and video through the 1980s and early '90s, I have moved over the past decade to installation and performance projects, many of them in collaboration with one or more other artists. My collaboration with the feminist artist collective subRosa has as its goal to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and bio technologies on women's bodies, lives, and work. This collective work is ongoing and we are preparing for a performance in SW Missouri University in September 2003. The work I am presenting here, however, includes projects of a smaller scale, and work I have done with different collaborators. This growing body of my work combines art, activism, and politics to investigate, represent and reveal one of the primary requirements for life on our planet... water.

In this work I have attempted to address how we perceive, live with and limit access to our waterways. In 1999 Sandra Postel, author of Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, suggested that "spreading water shortages threaten to reduce the global food supply by more than 10 percent," and, "left unaddressed, these shortages could lead to hunger, civil unrest, and even wars over water." The local situation is not so dire, but even in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, the 14 tributary streams that dump into Pittsburgh's rivers allow millions of gallons of untreated human waste and industrial pollutants to flush into local creeks and rivers. According to the Allegheny County Sanitory Authority these storm overflows occur in hundreds of locations on 50 to 60 days a year.

The following three projects represent water issues in very different ways: WELL illuminates the history of women's involvement in environmental health struggles with wall paintings, hanging prints and a website, Toxic Vernacular makes the degradation of our rivers visible by bringing the residue into the gallery and The River's Edge paints a simple line on the ground to remind us that human culture has made irreversible alterations to our rivers and landscapes.