UNIVERSITY OF UTAH (UT)

Photo: by Gretchen E. Henderson (July 2015) and one of the project postcards for Dear Body of Water: LOCATE.

Dear Body of Water grows from many bodies of water, notably Great Salt Lake. Often likened to a dead sea, this lake is wildly alive and entangled with watersheds of the American West, supporting human and more-than-human lives.

This landlocked lake inspired Gretchen E. Henderson to launch Dear Body of Water, with prompt poem, film, and inaugural set of postcards sourced from her book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea, where intermedia tributaries follow water, melt and freeze, seeping into different forms.

Great Salt Lake invites paying closer attention to relationships—between water and salt, art and tar, human-made and natural imprints, birds and beyond—that might help us perceive overlooked ecologies, not only far afield but right where we are.

Walk the shoreline of this reputedly dead sea and listen for life where you may not expect:

Film "Toward a Bird's Eye View: Beyond mine, extracted" (2021) by Gretchen E. Henderson, from exhibition on Mining the West (2022) with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and University of Utah Marriott Library.

Listening with Water

Play the film and listen for a hush: the voice of water. The sound (undercurrent of narrative) is river runoff from the Uinta Mountains en route to Great Salt Lake (May 17, 2020). These ambient vibration measurements are sped up to be translated into the range of human hearing. Blending on-the-ground (human) and aerial (akin to bird's eye) views and related soundscapes, the film offers a virtual portal to Great Salt Lake's retreating shoreline that has revealed tar seeps, or natural pools of raw oil. Whether or not you visit this lake in person, reflect on how you might move beyond human-bound, visually-dominated senses of water to engage other perspectives and perceptions. As you listen wherever you are, what do you hear?

To learn more about the film and exhibition, details here.

Related Events:

• Keynote Speaker/Book Launch for 35th Anniversary of Tanner Humanities Center (April 2023)
• Tanner Humanities Center Talk (February 2019)
• Science Wednesday Speaker for Taft-Nicholson Center (June 2018)
• Coverage on local media outlets including NPR
• More resources can be found here.

Land Acknowledgement (adapted from University of Utah): With gratitude to longtime Indigenous stewards of the land currently called Utah: We acknowledge that this land, named for the Ute Tribe, is the unceded, traditional, and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. We acknowledge the significance of place and the continued existence and contributions of indigenous people who have lived on and cared for this land for thousands of years. We respect the sovereign relationship between tribes, states, and the federal government, and we affirm the need for more commitment to listening and partnerships with Native Nations and Urban Indian communities.

Thanks to: Annie Clark Tanner Fellowship in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah, Tanner Humanities Center, Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Holt/Smithson Foundation, and more listed at the end of film and book.

Photo: Pagespread of photographs by Gretchen E. Henderson from LA+/Landscape Architecture Plus (2023).

Great Salt Lake as seen from International Space Station, photograph by Alexander Gerst, European Space Agency, public domain, 2014.

WATERSHED

Great Salt Lake lives in a closed basin with no outlet to oceans.