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Photo by Rik Sferra.

Content warning: sexual assault.

I want you to think for a moment about your earliest memory of water. 

What’s the story of that memory? Is it something fun? Maybe something scary? Was it traumatic, or funny, or formative? Are there other people attached to that memory? The more you think about it, does it help you understand any aspect of your life since then — your fears perhaps, your relationship to water, or maybe your family?

Whatever it is, Shanai Matteson wants to talk about it. She is an artist, a poet, and a storyteller, among other things, and water often plays a central role in the stories she tells. We got together two weeks ago at her home in Northeast Minneapolis, in what would be my last in-person meeting for perhaps a very long time. Matteson is in the midst of preparing work for an exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum that was scheduled for May but is now facing postponement because of the coronavirus shutdowns. Still, just as the river flows, so too the work continues.

Titled A Ship’s First Shape, the project is a collection of water stories from women working as climate scientists, health advocates, and water protectors. It's part of the Weisman’s Collaboration Incubator program, which connects artists to other professionals across different disciplines, often in the sciences. For this project, Matteson teamed up with Dr. Mae Davenport from the U of M, who studies the human dimension of natural resource management, including people’s attitudes towards wetlands restoration, watershed conservation, and recreational boating practices.

The research shows, Matteson explains, that regardless of “social class, culture, or geography, women always valued water in a different way. They used different types of words and had closer connections to the way that water sustains life.”

In some of the stories, water is a place of fear and violence: one respondent remembers being thrown into a river by her older brothers before she could swim. In others, it's a refuge: one describes secretly floating down the river on an inner tube to escape her family and visit her best friend. The artist’s own grandmother contributed to the interviews as well. “She started out sharing a memory about rescuing her sister,” says Matteson, “but by the end of the story, it was about the first time she was assaulted. It was a common story, but it was something she told me she had never shared with anyone.”

These stories, though specific and unique, actually flesh out the lived realities of many women. It's absurd when you think about it: a full half of the population is made to live in fear, to be both coveted and erased, commodified and devalued. The other half of the population, I can attest, remains willfully, scornfully oblivious. No surprise, I guess, in a culture built around extraction and exploitation. “There are so many parallels in how women are treated, how human beings are treated,” Matteson says, “and how the environment is treated.” 

Her plan is to work with printmaker and comic artist Zak Sally to produce a series of risograph prints that capture the essence of each story, boiling them down to an image and a phrase from each interview. Something simple, elemental, like a high-heeled shoe or a book in a ziplock bag. She sees this project through the metaphor of a raft, with plans to lash these touchstone objects together as a sculpture, forming a makeshift lifeboat. Here her background as a poet shines through, revealing a passion for etymology: in its most basic form, a raft is a group of things bound together, often for survival. Its Nordic root simply means “an abundance.” “I think about it in the way that anything we create together keeps us afloat,” she says. "I'm kind of a word geek," she adds with a laugh.

Top: Water Bar's pop-up tasting event at the Minnesota State Fair, 2017-19. Bottom: A meeting at Water Bar of the Ways of Knowing Water Research Collaborative, a group of artists, scientists, activists, and healers facilitated by the Weisman Art Museum.

Water has run through much of Matteson’s work over the years, especially as one of the founders of Water Bar & Public Studio. An art project turned B Corp, Water Bar hosts tastings of different municipal waters, on-site and off, as a way to get people thinking — and talking — about their connection to water. Or their lack thereof. Most of us probably don’t think too much about where our water comes from before it reaches our faucet; probably even less about where it goes once it slips down the drain. 

Water Bar is closing its storefront on Central Avenue this month but will soon launch an online platform (also called Raft), a social network for people creating content around water and climate, be it artwork, writing, podcasts, or videos. “Hopefully that’s a place where our partners in government and research and business can start to build relationships,” she says, “and hopefully have those transformative experiences with art and storytelling that they can bring back to their work.”

This emphasis on connection is the dominant through-line in Matteson’s work, even more so than water. Her practice is fundamentally collaborative, developing relationships with artists, musicians, social scientists, researchers, educators, community organizers, Indigenous activists, and the audience itself. “It’s not about the visual art as something that someone consumes in an art space,” she says, “It’s about the process.” 

Mine / Not Mine (detail), assemblage of found and hand-printed fabrics, 2019. Part of the ongoing Overburden / Overlook project.

Another ongoing project is Overburden / Overlook, a collaboration with social scientist Dr. Roopali Phadke that is focused on Minnesota’s Iron Range, where Matteson grew up and where her grandfather worked as a miner. Over the past four years, Matteson and Phadke have been interviewing residents there about mining as an industry, as an ecological threat, and as a cultural identity. 

As copper & nickel mining contracts get battled over in the courts, some locals have remained staunchly pro-mine thanks to what Matteson calls a “nostalgia of sacrifice and suffering.” It’s a difficult, dirty, dangerous job in an industry beset by labor disputes. It’s also tied, inextricably, to the philosophy of extraction. This nostalgia, Matteson thinks, is the result of good marketing and foggy memories. Alongside cultures of extraction, she says, there has always been regeneration — feeding, healing, and caretaking — women’s work that is often erased and undervalued. “That nostalgia is not just about mining, it’s about keeping an order that makes sense to people.”

Part of that old order, of course, is a culture of white supremacy. Like a skeleton just under the surface, it can be hidden but still visible, forming the backbone of this widespread entitlement to land and bodies. White women occupy a strange space in that hierarchy, subjugated by patriarchy but still empowered by their whiteness, while Indigenous people and women of color face sexualized and gendered violence (and erasure) at much higher rates, often as a targeted means of extermination. America's history of lynching shows plainly how white female sexuality has been sharpened into a double-edged sword, used to control white women even as it has been weaponized against people of color. Matteson, herself a white woman, tries to remain aware of that power imbalance in her own work, as she leads these conversations.

They can be tough conversations to have, but art-making helps get them started. Matteson has hosted craft workshops across the Iron Range, inviting residents to join her in rolling felt into balls the size of iron taconite pellets, or dying ornamental lace and fabric with the ruddy dust of mine waste that the companies call “overburden.” The stuff is everywhere up there, tracked inside on your boots and clothes. “When they see this [familiar material], then that’s an entry point for a conversation,” she says. “My hope is that people come into a greater understanding of the complexities of these issues and also a greater sense of who they are in a constellation.”

Top: Kinship Flags made during a public workshop led by Matteson and Graci Horne, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Felt earrings next to taconite pellets, part of Felt Here, a pop-up workshop in communities across the Iron Range, 2019. Photo by the author.

It all comes back to narrative, she says. “A lot of us are living in bad stories.” It’s a simple, devastating truth, one that cuts to the stubborn core of so many problems in this country. It’s the reason why we vote against our interests, why we stay in abusive relationships, why we let our trash fall from our fingers and flow down a storm drain. The cure can be as simple as telling those stories out loud to someone else, finding the moment when your own words stop making sense to you. It can also be a way to find empathy — in Matteson's words, "to recognize ourselves and others." A lot of lessons, though, take a lifetime to unlearn.

“I was told from the moment I can remember to be afraid of men, to be afraid of water, to be afraid,” she says. “And then you learn from the women around you how to survive in that world. And when it’s time to actually try to imagine something different, we’re left with these structures and these shapes that were really built for something else.”

“I think that the cultural transformations that are happening are really important. Artists have a unique role as listeners and witnesses, and in our ability to imagine different futures. I take that work really seriously.”

The story of the woman being thrown into a river as a young girl is, on its face, about fear and violence and vulnerability. About being powerless in the face of patriarchy and the forces of nature. “But,” says Matteson, “there’s a whole story underneath that about survival. Try to flip that story around to where you can remember that the river is a source of life. It’s about the nourishment and the care. It’s why women tell each other these stories.”

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The conversation between these two artists will take place online Thursday, April 2nd, at 6:30pm Central on Zoom. 

To view more of the artists' work, visit their websites: Sean Connaughty and Shanai Matteson. All images are courtesy of the artists unless otherwise noted.