Nora York

Water, Water Everywhere: Songs About Climate Change

http://tinyurl.com/norawater

Nora York performing “It Rained for One Thousand Years” at Joe’s Pub in New York, November 10, 2013. Part of the song cycle Water Water Everywhere, composed by Jamie Lawrence and Nora York.

Nora York has performed and written her own music for theater, film, television, concert and cabaret. She has four CDs in release, been awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, two New York State Council on the Arts Composers Commissions and her work has been commissioned by The Public Theater in New York, The Brooklyn Academy of Music and BRIC Arts Media. She has performed at concert venues, universities and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada and Europe. (Ted, Newport Jazz Festival, Ottawa Jazz Festival, JVC Jazz festival, Lincoln Center, and Merkin Hall and Lincoln Center Out of Doors.) She is on the faculty of the Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music at New York University, teaching performance and musicianship.

Sally Elliott

Upstream Mussels

Sally Elliott received her MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder, then taught as a college professor for many years. She has exhibited both locally and nationally and was a recipient of a fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities and a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts. Her paintings in gouache contain metaphors, memories and dreams and have been described as mystical and influenced by Mexican art, Tibetan Thangka paintings and Asia art. She is a member of Spark Gallery in Denver. http://www.Sallyelliottart.com

Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling, poet and translator, lives in the Southern Rockies and teaches at Naropa University. Recent poetry is A Possible Bag (Singing Horse) and recent translation is Bright as an Autumn Moon: Fifty Poems from the Sanskrit (Mānoa). In April 2014, he and three other poets, North American and Scottish, did a tree-planting walking-poem along the 130-mile John Muir Way, coast to coast in Scotland. They called it a “pair of trees opens a new life” and did twenty-five plantings. He is at work on a prose book: linguistics, ecology, poetry, myth, Tracks Along the Left Coast. “The Emerald Tablet” is dedicated to the memory of biologist, ecologist, activist and essayist Peter Warshall, and was first published in Derek Fenner’s project, The Emerald Tablet.

Thomas A. Clark

A Small Subtraction from the River Add

The River Add runs through Argyll in the west of Scotland. To one side of the river is the ruined hill fort of Dunadd, a royal stronghold of the old Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada, and to the other side is Moine Mhor, The Great Moss.

Thomas A. Clark lives in the small fishing village of Pittenweem, on the east coast of Scotland. Among his books are Yellow & Blue and The Hundred Thousand Places. In 1973, he and the artist Laurie Clark founded Moschatel Press to produce artist’s books and poetry collections. In the summer months, they run Cairn, a project space for minimal and conceptual art (www.cairneditions.co.uk). Clark’s work often appears as installations or interventions in galleries, public spaces or in the landscape. A large collection of such work was installed throughout New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow.

Rachel Kelly

The Tap

Following the collapse of the economic system in Ireland, there has been a continuous need to increase taxes and broaden the tax base. With the involvement of the Troika (IMF/EU/ECB) attempting to rescue and bail out the country, a policy process for water charges was set into motion. Claims were made that this policy was a necessity.

However, the establishment of Irish water austerity was poorly managed and included excessive payments to consultants and bonuses for staff. Not only this, but dates and figures relating to the issuing of water charges changed frequently causing mistrust among the public. People are outraged at the lack of honesty and the way the situation has been handled. They now have to pay for one of the few things left they regard as their right.

The tap, situated on Gray Street, Dublin, is made from sewage piping which is used for transporting water under the city. It sits above a reservoir which can hold up to 16 gallons of water. An electrical pump sits inside the tap itself and continuously recycles the water from the reservoir and out the spout. This amount of water is related to the restrictions of water usage in each household.

The tap is used to identify just how much water people have used and how much of that water usage will be restricted. The pubic had a great response to the project.

Wallpaper

The wallpaper displays a repeat pattern of an image of a water meter. The image was screen printed by hand onto 11 rolls of black wallpaper and then pasted onto the walls of a living room in a Dublin household. Very few people are able to identify the image as a water meter. The project highlights how these issues affect us though we’re so unable to identify the route of the problem, we wouldn’t recognize it even if it were plastered on the walls of our homes.

Rachel Kelly is an artist studying Fine Art Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland. She is interested in the social and cultural aspects of the world we live in today and the current events that surround us.