'Headwaters to Heartlands:' Lauren Rosenthal McManus

Her work focuses on the relationship between communities and their local watersheds and she draws upon map making, cartography, art history, and ecology to reveal, explore, and re-envision our culture’s complex relationship with fresh water. Her practice is centered on creating large, site- specific, temporary wall drawing murals of regional watersheds using pigments made from rocks and soil collected along their banks. For her show at GOCA Downtown, she made a monumental scale drawing of the Fountain Creek watershed and is also exhibiting prints from her artist book, “Political / Hydrological: A Watershed Remapping of the Contiguous United States”, a folio that re-envisions the geo-political boundaries of each of our country’s lower 48 states fifty states by way of their primary watersheds.

Artist Statement: Ecology serves as the conceptual framework of my investigation and maps provide the visual language for my expression. I make prints, drawings, and sculptures that use watersheds as symbols of interconnectedness.

The artist’s process leads me into the landscape in multiple ways: walking into the woods and along stream banks awakens an immediate, sensory experience of place; composing images with spatial data provides an expansive and analytical geographic perspective; repetitive mark making opens a meditative path that offers insights gained through time spent with sustained focus. Together, these practices define my creative exploration about how we understand and imagine ourselves in relationship to the environment.