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The Art of Awareness water quality is shaped by sculpture
hat would you do with 1,000 pounds of trash? That question was put to artist David Williamson 11 years ago after Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) staff pulled 100 cubic yards of debris out of the Maquoketa River. Williamson’s answer was blunt: “I wouldn’t do anything with it.” His vision following the DNR’s initial Project AWARE (A Watershed Awareness River Expedition) was collaborative. “I’d help volunteers build something with the trash.” An Ogden artist who lived and breathed recycling years before it was popular, Williamson wanted to shine the light on the volunteers who take to canoes every year to clean up Iowa waterways and to engage the public in owning river quality. Art, he was confident, could do both. For the past decade Williamson has used the Iowa State Fair as his studio, taking input from AWARE volunteers and the public as together they create artwork that draws visitors into the story of Iowa’s river cleanup efforts. “The art is real-time and improvisational,” he explains, describing the collective process. A sculpture titled Drop In began when Williamson asked volunteers to be on the lookout for trash to use in art. One volunteer pulled a broken plastic 12-inch stand for a birdbath out of the Little Sioux River. “Look at this,” said the paddler. “It looks like a water droplet with a door in it.” Williamson took that volunteer’s water droplet idea. Using a tractor tire rim, rebar, and fence posts — some 500 pounds of river trash — he began to cast the parts of a sculpture in front of, and with the help of, people gathered in the DNR Courtyard off the Grand Concourse. Children helped pour molten aluminum into swirling shapes cast from cracked elements of an old electric stove. 20
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(“Symbolically, the shapes tell us to keep water quality on the front burner,” says Williamson.) Adults helped transform fence post spades into the wings of herons that volunteers often see soaring over the rivers. Parts of a child’s bicycle become a junkyard frog. The result is a 9½-foot-tall sculpture that awakened in volunteers an awareness of how trash could become story and invited fair visitors inside their story to experi-
ripples 10 years of Project AWARE 786 river miles 2,539 volunteers 793 sponsors 484,719 pounds (242 tons) of trash (70% recycled) 176,002 pounds of scrap metal transformed into art iowaprojectaware.com