The Tale of Lost Waters
The Tale of Lost Waters highlights many of the 53% of our global lakes and inland seas that have existed for millions of years and are now a fraction of their original size. Each painting portrays the diminishment over mere decades of a single body of water. Today, some of these lakes, such as Lake Poopó in Bolivia, Lake Poyang in China, and Lake Chad, located at the juncture of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, are nearly gone.
The paintings include photographs, maps, cyanotype prints, medical gauze, and fragments of recycled works. I incorporate gauze to stress the wounds that have been inflicted on bodies of water by over-extraction, over-consumption and climate change. Commonly associated with historic texts and records, the scroll format of the paintings serves as a genealogical record of the world’s lakes and a memorial to what once flourished.
The history of landscape painting includes works that propose nature as sublime and romantic. In The Tale of Lost Waters, I create landscapes that are unstable and disfigured. They exemplify what I call the ironic beauty of damaged environments. Constructed as highly fractured surfaces, the paintings characterize the landscapes of our time—receding coastlines, pockmarked expanses, the proliferation of sinkholes, and desert where there was once water. The Tale of Lost Waters is an on-going series.
MEDIA ON THE TALE OF LOST WATERS
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation Committee, July 29, 2025
Art Spiel, The Tale of Lost Waters - Susan Hoffman Fishman at Five Points Arts by Etty Yaniv, March 17, 2025.
