water cuts through | Joan Collins

In Claim the Horizon, a single azure line becomes both boundary and beginning - a mark pressed across the convas like a declaration of what's possible. Here, the horizon is claimed not in dominance, but in becoming...a quite insistence that the future can be drawn, reshaped, and renewed through the elemental touch of water.

The series "Water Cuts Through" was inspired in part by the legacy of Maria "Poveka" Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo, whose work reminds me that earth and water hold stories far older than our own. The Pueblo's Tewa name Po-Woh-Geh Oweenge translated as "where the water cuts through" - opened a deeper understanding for me of how water marks land, carries memory, and reveals what is essential. As I create this series, which started on the desert floor, water becomes my collaborator: shaping, softening, carving, and illuminating. Each piece is a meditation on the power and tenderness of water - what it reveals, what it brings forward, and the touch it leaves behind.

I offer this work with gratitude to the land I create on, homelands of the Navajo (Dine) and Hopi peoples, and in acknowledgement of the enduring relationships between Indigenous communities and the natural forces that inspire this series.