PRESS

Selected Press and Publication Excerpts:

Irland was the first artist honored by the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and the Bureau of Land Management for her work with the environment. This essay describes a group hike down into the Rio Grande Gorge to release ice books into the river followed by a campfire dinner.

"One component of artist Basia Irland's contribution to the new exhibit Mapping a Green Future at the Center for Contemporary Arts consists of music for cello and a mezzo-soprano singing the names of the chemical pesticides found in the Calaveras River in California. The piece, Clandestine Calaveras, plays throughout the Muñoz Waxman Gallery. 'My work [for the exhibit] includes sculptural backpack/repositories containing canteens, logbooks, maps, video documentaries, and photographs from three of my five Gathering of Water projects,' said Irland, professor emeritus in the department of art and art history at The University of New Mexico, from her studio in Albuquerque. Irland, a sculptor, installation artist, poet, and book artist, is active in water issues…."

"Also at 516 Arts are photographs by Basia Irland of ecologically based riparian restoration 'performances' in which she launches ice books -- large carved ice embedded with indigenous seeds -- on rivers all over the world, including the Rio Grande. When the ice melts, the seeds are released and carried on the river's currents to sprout along the banks."

"Basia Irland has floated her 250-pound ice books down rivers worldwide. Her newest volumes will travel and reseed the Rio Grande. Each book carries a 'text' of local native seeds, which are released as the ice melts in the current. The resulting plants help hold soil in place, restore eroded riverbanks, provide shelter for native animals and sequester carbon dioxide. Irland works with ecologists, biologists and botanists to match seeds to individual riparian zones. Her receding/reseeding ice sculptures and documentary film address solutions to the erosion and pollution of watersheds."

"Another multi-sited work, receding/reseeding by Basia Irland, will feature a June 28 excursion on the Rio Grande involving the launch of some of her Ice Books, large carved blocks of ice embedded with local seeds. A show of Irland's ice sculptures and photographs will go on view at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe [July 3-31]."

"I want to report on the stunning exhibition by Basia Irland at the newly re-opened gallery at the Evergreen State College. How can such a lovely person change the world? Only through the power of her concern about the planet. At the opening she thanked everyone and then reminded us all that someone dies every 8 seconds from a preventable water borne illness.

"What I really enjoyed is that Basia is truly interdisciplinary in her outreach. Involved were science professors, biologists, a park ranger, and each one had their own story, their own relationship to the work. This is a successful endeavor, when everyone is involved and cares."

"When the Albuquerque Museum asked her to create a fountain, she designed a piece that captures rainwater in a 50-gallon steel tank on the roof and sends drops flowing onto cast bronze arms on the sculpture below. The fountain only runs when it rains, the sculpture quietly remarking on our arid climate's absence of water."

"Frozen creek water, carved to look like an open book, with rows of seeds suggesting lines of text, was returned to the creek to release the seeds to grow into plants that will usefully absorb carbon."

"Part encyclopedia, part meditation, this unique book isn't just something to read, it's an experience. The entire book is imbued with a sense of wonder and reverence for the natural world."

"Fantastic and magical libraries haunt certain poetic imaginations. Take the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, for example. This Argentine librarian's imagined Library of Babel was a surreal setting. And the lost library of Alexandria, Egypt, haunts myth and legend. The objects in Basia Irland's visionary book Water Library include vials of liquid, cabinets of objects, and assemblages like Kit for Paddling Through Stars Floating on a Lake, which is composed of handmade linden-wood paddles, constellation charts, aerial photographs, and maps that seem designed to guide us from known terrain on a shamanic or dream journey. Books appear but cannot be read in a conventional manner, because they are composed of soil, salt, and lichen."

"We are water. It's in us, around us, nurtures us, keeps us healthy, makes the world and all its creatures thrive and without it we will surely die. Arguably, water is the single most important community issue we will face in the coming decades. And, while there are plenty of books and articles that pick apart these social, political and artistic relationships, few are as engrossing nor as inspiring as the new volume by Basia Irland.

"That's quite a bit to say, actually, but Irlands' book will have you looking at liquid in ways you never imagined."

"Our bodies house streams: lymph, bile, sweat, blood, mucus, urine. Water enters, circulates, leaves – individualized hydrologic cycles. Each of us is a walking ocean, sloshing down the hallway with damp saline innards held together by a paper-thin epidermis.

"I peered into the microscope and watched a minute creature that looked like a plump sperm dancing in circles. It was Giardia (lamblia) duodenalis, an aquatic parasite similar to the one I contracted swimming in polluted rivers in Indonesia. Learning that deaths from water-borne diseases equal 20 jumbo jets crashing every day, I began to collaborate with scientists on a series of international projects that focused on these beautiful, deadly pathogens. Recently while working along the Nile in Egypt and Ethiopia, I created a documentary…."

"We, in Northern India are faced with a void of fighters for water with dedication like that of Sister Basia who can fight for a thirsty Gujarat."
(Translated from Gujarati)