One of the commissions I am working on, I See You in Me, is a project that is over a mile long and will be installed in conjunction with the upcoming “Hike the Heights” event on June 7. The thread of mirrors will mark the original pathway of the Croton Aqueduct as it entered into Manhattan.* The project idea for the mirrors came about from a desire to 1) create something that looked a little like rain drops and 2) reflected us in the piece to comment on our deep connection to both water and our municipal water source.

Along the path will be laid larger mirrored pieces which include information on the history of water in NYC (a sordid one well told in “Water for Gotham“) our current relationship to water, and the steps we need to take to reduce our consumption and why.

Currently this all means that I have found a couple of broken mirrors, out in the trash and am spending the holiday cutting, threading, glue-ing and gel-ing (coating the sharp edges).

*It crossed from the Bronx over a beautiful arched bridge, into the Highbridge Park in Washington Heights. There the water was stored in a reservoir (now a swimming pool) and pushed up into a water tower (still standing and with beautiful views) then back down through the park (the path I am marking) and through the city to the big reservoir which stood where the main NY Public Library now stands in Bryant Park).

Images, from top to bottom (all by me & Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 licensed):
-looking up into the Highbridge Water Tower
-a gelled piece of glass
-cut mirrors getting glued to the monofilament