THE CONFLUENCE PROJECT

My work with the Confluence Project is a series of four large-scale art/landscape installations along the Columbia River basin marking the two- hundred-year anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s journey west. The state of Washington had invited Native American tribes of the region— Chinook, Umatilla, Nez Perce— to participate in this historic commemoration in close dialog with federal, state, and local officials, and this group in turn had thought that my involvement would contribute to a more inclusive cultural history of this place.

As one tribal elder had put it, “Lewis and Clark did not discover this land. We were here.”

As I researched the project I realized that if I looked at Lewis and Clark’s journals as a lens, their incredible writings give us a glimpse back in time two hundred years. Rather than to see the explorers as the primary focus, I let their descriptions of each site be the starting point then researched a deeper history of each place. I could reveal a site as a confluence of cultures, of history and of ecology. Certain sites were selected for their importance to Lewis and Clark, others for their importance to the tribes and others still were selected for their ecological import. Each site was located at the confluence of key waterways, and each site became a way to see a place through varying perspectives. A critical aspect was the direct interaction with each tribe, whose homeland we had been invited into to create a work. And with each site, through that active participation of the Native Americans, was incorporated into each artwork.

These four sites that encompass more than 15,000 acres of federal and state and city lands had oftentimes been badly planned with many of the natural features being obscured by parking lots, unsightly facilities, and inundated with nonnative plant species. A key goal was to connect visitors back to the land itself and to restore each site to a more native landscape.

My goal at times was to disappear, not to add an artwork, but my art was to erase prior damage and to restore a connection back to the environment, allowing the visitor a visceral and intimate connection back to the land itself.