FALLINGWATER (PA)

In Progress

At Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Dear Body of Water invites visitors to listen with voices of water that enliven more than a house but a waterscape. More than 5,000 acres around Fallingwater have been protected as the Bear Run Nature Reserve in partnership with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to steward the watershed of this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As an Artist-in-Residence, Gretchen Ernster Henderson considered Fallingwater a site of many falling waters, constantly changing through seasonal rain, ice, and snow, attuning the art of attention. She asks us to consider the lifeblood of this stream, fed by roaring storms and dripping seeps, asking, “What would Fallingwater be like without falling water?”

To attune to Fallingwater, take a few moments to listen with water and review some of ways that water writes her story on this landscape.

Listening with Water @ Fallingwater

Listening with Water is a site-based, acoustic water-harvest. Sourced from varied replenishing sites for Dear Body of Water, each water sampler interlinks nine recorded voices of water (1 minute each) into a 9-minute audio stream to invite contemplative listening, sounding and re-sounding. Even while sitting still at a distance, you can travel across time and place: here, to Bear Run flowing through Fallingwater. Remember that the human body is mostly water, both a body of water and an acoustic chamber, resonating with your pulsing heartbeat and humming nervous system, in or out of sync with the surrounding world. Close listening enhances aural literacy and sensory grounding, attuning and retuning. As a number, nine suggests gestation, so a question: What grows inside your imagination through listening? As you attune, what do you hear within this shifting interstitial space?

On Exhibit

After Gretchen's residency in Spring 2024, Fallingwater made a set of postcards from some of her WaterMark photographs. Dear Body of Water went on exhibit at Fallingwater through a poetic water-harvesting station, inviting the visitors, staff, and locals to add their voices to the project.

Reading Reflection

Imagine this landscape in a rainstorm at night: read a micro-essay on "Fallingwater" (in Brevity).

More Coming ~ Stay attuned!

Thanks to: Fallingwater's Artist-in-Residence program and staff including residency director and coordinator Ashley Andrykovitch and Marie Woof, the Educators and Volunteers Teams, filmmaker Michael Savisky and Make Roots, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and many more.

Land Acknowledgement (from the Pennsylvania Youth Congress): We recognize and acknowledge Pennsylvania as being the land of the Erielhonan (Erie), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Lenni-Lenape, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Tuscarora nations, and the Honniasont, Saluda, Saponi, Tutelo, and Wenrohronon tribes. We pay respect to the Native peoples of Pennsylvania past, present, and future and their continuing presence in their homeland and throughout their diasporas ... This land acknowledgement is an opening for us all to understand the role each of us have in supporting Native peoples right now." Read the full statement as a living document here.

WATERSHED

Bear Run—Youghiogheny River—Monongahela River—Ohio River—Mississippi River—Gulf of Mexico—Atlantic Ocean