Marie Hanlon’s new exhibition and publication, Water — More or Less, brings together a significant body of work made by the artist in response to the finite nature of a most precious resource, water. This publication includes images of the individual artworks, installation images at The LAB Gallery in Dublin, essays by writer Nathan O’Donnell and geographer Susan Hegarty, alongside a transcript of a conversation between the artist and the independent curator Eamonn Maxwell, recorded just prior to the exhibition.

In his essay for this publication, Nathan O’Donnell writes about the paradoxes of the material qualities of water, as a conduit, resource and hazard. A bringer of civilisation and destruction, a source of trade and life. In reading his consideration of water’s necessary infrastructure, I was reminded of a work previously shown at the gallery.

In 2017, for an exhibition Emer O’Boyle and I curated at The LAB called Future Proof, artist Brian Duggan showed his work, ‘Atmospheric, Underground, Exoatmospheric, Underwater, 2054 test sites, the first 13 sites’. The work shows maps of what at first appear like a series of tropical islands, and some indeed are, but they are depicted because they are nuclear test sites. The images are reproduced on tea towels, a familiar domestic item, often printed with maps as holiday souvenirs. For Duggan, the choice of the recognisable, tactile object was to deliberately draw the viewer into a place of knowing, to something readily identifiable, before layering information about the destruction of our planet. Describing his documentation of nuclear testing at the time, Duggan talked about the influence in his work on the nuclear disaster at Fukashima in 2011. For Duggan, the tea towels remind us that the water that comes through our kitchen taps is part of the same cycle as the oceans that carry toxic waste by accident and design; the hyper-local and the global are inextricably linked. In Hanlon’s work, a series of domestic taps line the gallery walls with their water flow physically knotted, their flow halted by an unseen force.

Hanlon grew up by the river Barrow, Co. Kilkenny, and her relationship with water in her formative years is referred to in her interview with Eamonn Maxwell. She now lives by the sea, a water body whose horizon line suggests infinity. In her research Hanlon has been looking at the proposals to use desalination as a means of producing drinking water, the infrastructure and byproducts of which form part of the story of these sculptures.

Throughout the works in this exhibition Hanlon invites familiar entry points: taps, vessels, references to the body. We have a myriad of ways into the work and

its inspiration. But the way out, and our role going forward, is more complex. Could desalination, for instance, be a means of producing drinking water? Susan Hegarty’s text refers to the mind-boggling amount of water used by data centres throughout Ireland. The abstract nature of ‘the cloud’ is like the supposedly ‘infinite’ nature of water. It is shocking to learn that in one day cooling a single data centre requires as much water as 1,400 households. Hanlon’s work also refers to the contaminating forces of fracking which, though illegal in the Republic of Ireland, continues in many other parts of our shared planet.

There’s a seemingly ludicrous scene in the 2012 film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s book The Lorax, where, because of mass production, deforestation and pollution, the town’s chief businessman, O’Hare, plans to sell clean air. His devious plan is threatened by the possible reintroduction of trees. The Lorax was written over fifty years ago but its message is as prescient as ever. Dr. Seuss, or Theodor Seuss Geisel, was a children’s author who wrote the work as a parable to explain, in a simple way, the devastating effects humans can have on our planet.

Hanlon’s exhibition calls our attention to the choices that need to be made regarding our future water sources. It’s a temporary exhibition, a moment in a much larger issue that highlights both our unconscious everyday attitude to the availability of fresh water alongside the climate crisis facing the world. Extreme changes in weather that bring drought and flooding present an infrastructural challenge, as outlined in O’Donnell’s text, as the pace of change outruns our plans. While it seems almost too much to bear to find our place in this, Hegarty gives an example of the local river community groups springing up around Ireland acting as custodians of local waterways. It gives hope that by connecting, we can create change. But as the Lorax says,

UNLESS someone like you

cares a whole awful lot,

nothing’s going to get better.

It’s not.