Ice Cairn

A queue of people is lining up to collect water at the spring on the road to Port Alfred. As one of Grahamstown’s only available sources of clean water, the spring has become a meeting point for people all over the town, a uniquely democratic space where social standing is overridden by the necessity for clean water. One afternoon as the sun was setting Tony East and I installed a quiet intervention above the mouth of the spring – a cairn, or way-finder, made of a pile of boulder-shaped ice sitting precariously above the water collectors. We collected the water for this sculpture at strategic points on our drive from Cape Town to Knysna – stopping at bodies of water that hold either social or personal significance to the artists. The sites include the Liesbeck River, Steenbras River, Knysna River, Kranshoek Waterfall, Storm’s River Bridge and Grey Dam, with the quality of each different water source clearly visible in the colouration of the different pieces of ice. At each site where water was taken, a dry-ice construction was left in exchange. Evaporating into Carbon Dioxide, this trade was representative of a miniature carbon footprint, a poor (though harmless to the underwater flora and fauna) exchange for the natural resource the we removed to bring to Grahamstown.

As well as commenting on environmental factors, the work also speaks of the process of journeying, making visible the physical and emotional process of travel, where going somewhere is often more important than getting there. Transience is a key motif here; with evaporating sculptures and ice melting into running water. Aside from the few surprised spectators, the work exists only in photography, exuding a pathos that reflects the global loss of water resources, the sadness of moving on and the fleeting nature of the present.

And the spring, inevitably, beginning to run dry.

Photographs: Colin Groenewald