Speculative Aquifers

Speculative Aquifers is a project that grew out of research for my book Disabled Ecologies. The book looks at a historic case of groundwater contamination in Tucson, AZ. As the project developed, I realized I needed a way to map my changing understanding of aquifers, which was evolving constantly as I learned about the effects of pollution upon Tucson’s human and more-than-human communities. I began drawing aquifers, trying to visualize what they are and what they do. Over the course of the project my understanding of aquifers transformed many times, from infrastructure, to ecosystems, to bodies, like any others, reaching for what nurtures them. 

Click on each image below to enlarge:

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an Aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. A dark blue pool resembling water lies below a more strictly delineated, brown mass, calling the earth to mind. A funnel leads up through this “earth”, connecting the pool to the upper half of the image, where a slanted gray rectangle resembling concrete bisects the top half of the picture into two sides, a darker blue left side, and a lighter blue right one.

Aquifer Infrastructure

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 8″ x 10″

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. A dark blue mass occupies the center of the image, enveloped by a light brown mass. Both are clearly delineated from one another, and their borders resemble the unangular shapes of sponges. In the top left, top right, and bottom right corners of the frame a bright white space appears.

Aquifer Container

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 6″ x 7″

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. A brown, spongelike mass sits upon a dark silhouette at the center of the image. A blue puddle forms beneath it. The sponge is ringed by white mountains delineated by a few etchings. Far in the distance rests the pitch-black silhouette of another mountain.

Aquifer Sponge

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 6″ x 6″

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. Four thick strokes have been brushed across the image from left to right. From top to bottom, they are blue-gray, gray, russet, and dark blue. Concentrated on the right side of the image, atop these strokes, is a set of dark lines that thicken and thin, crossing over themselves, playful and unruly.

Aquifer Trails

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 6″ x 6″

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. The lines traced in this image are faint and fluid. In the bottom left of the image small circles have been traced, and squiggles descend from the top of the image. Colors seem to interchange freely with one another, faint yellows, light blues, blue-grays, darker blues, brown, white, and pale reds interrupting and blending into one another.

Aquifer Body

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
11″ x 4″

  • A drawing in pen and watercolor of an aquifer, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. Against the background of the image, at the top, is the dark jagged silhouette of a mountainside. From this mountainside, many small, dark dots leak, resembling water. The dots move down through the impression of a valley made by pencil strokes, colored faint blues, yellows, and russet. At the bottom of the frame, beneath where the dark droplets convene, a smooth  dark underground silhouette can be seen, echoing the silhouette of the mountainside.

Aquifer Network

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 6″ x 6″

  • A drawing of an aquifer in pen and watercolor on brown paper, as imagined by Sunaura Taylor. Cloud-like lines of water connect to one another, reaching from the bottom-right corner of the image up to the top-left corner. Midway through their movement to the top-left of the frame the lines of water become arms with hands resembling the hands of humans with arthrogryposis. They reach up and past one another toward the top-left, where the roots of an unseen tree  stretch down toward them, straining to reach one another, falling short.

Aquifer Losing Reach

2017-2020
Pen and Watercolor on Paper
apx 11″ x 8″

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