Tracing Water was a day-long interactive art-making event held at Sulis Studio, organized in response to the local impacts of the flooding that happened over the summer of 2023. Activities offered included printmaking, cyanotypes, pottery, weaving and painting, followed by a fundraiser lunch and panel discussion about the history and future of the Mill River and how local organizations are building climate resilience for an uncertain future. Installations were made from upcycled materials found in a river clean of the Mill River near Sulis Studio with the Connecticut River Conservancy. All proceeds for the fundraiser went to Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust.

As we face climate disaster and its local and global impacts, the question circles back with staggering repetition: how did we get here, and where do we go from here? If the time between the floods and droughts continues to shrink, so does our time to recover. The movement and fluctuations of rivers hold history and futurity at once, and to trace rivers is to understand, through the restoration of our relationship to them, how to move forward. Through interactive art activities and invitations to participate in ritual embodiment, participants were invited to reflect on these questions as they each created a square for a collective quilt.

To trace is to make one’s way back, or to make sense of something. To trace is to outline, to map onto. Traces are the echoes of what remains. To trace water is to know history. To trace rivers is to enter into a lost relationship, to discover the lifeline that rivers are, and to know the simultaneous precarity and sturdiness of their place in our world today.