Curated by Community Curator, Arlinda Shtuni, Waterlines explores Somerville’s origins, urban expansion, and ever-changing ecology through stories about water.

Seeking the Source is a project by the artist Hey There Kapplow, commissioned for the exhibition Waterlines at the Somerville Museum, in Somerville MA (USA) from December 2022 - March 2023. It uses water as a metaphor for intuition, and the tenacious persistence of the practice of dowsing in the modern world as a symbol of our capacity to retain and nurture intuitive understanding even while we rely on technologies and enlightenment-age logics for our day to day operations in a way that would seem to make intuition obsolete.

The exhibition hosts a collection of ‘objects with soundtracks’ I’ve made which evolved out of an interest in the contemporary coexistence of the folk-practice of dowsing (water divining) alongside more modern methods of detecting and assessing the presence of water underground.

In addition to the works on display in the museum, I will offer a walking-based, participatory experience on March 19, 2023, which I’ll list as a separate calendar event here as the date grows closer.

The development of Seeking the Source has been supported by The Somerville Museum, Flux Factory, ARoS Museum, Useful Art for Communities, and USF Bergen.