Katie Holten

Ireland

KATIE HOLTEN is an artist, activist and author of the bestselling book, The Language of Trees. She represented Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Bronx Museum of the Arts, Nevada Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, VISUAL Contemporary, and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Holten has conceived major public commissions including TREE MUSEUM for New York City. She has received numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright Scholarship, Pollock Krasner Award, and MacDowell Fellowship.

Her work investigates the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. She co-founded the local community action group Friends of Ardee Bog to challenge the Irish government’s assault on Ardee Bog. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Vogue, Artforum, and Frieze. She is a contributor to Emergence Magazine and a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene.

Holten writes and rewrites the phrase “water is life” in blue ink on white paper. As she writes, she gently caresses each letter, pressing them like flower petals preserved between the pages of a book. The letters and words mirror themselves, like reflections in water.

Playing with the physicality of language, Holten’s handwriting looks like entomological specimens. The intricate drawings appear like hieroglyphics, revealing their message only on close examination.

The Lakota phrase “Mni wichoni” (“Water is life”) was the protest anthem from Standing Rock heard around the world, but it also has a spiritual meaning rooted in Indigenous world views. For Native Americans, water does not only sustain life, it is sacred.

Water is Life is a simple statement that asks how can we create cross-cultural understanding for a river’s rights to protection? How do we help guarantee such “rights of nature” in mainstream jurisprudence?

“Never again,” they vowed. “Water is life. Mni Wiconi. This is all we have left — our river, and the lands you didn ’t take last time. ”
—Chante Tin’sa Kinanzi Po

What is the language we need to live right now?

How can we learn to be better lovers of the world?

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