Water is a unifying motif tying Kelley O’Brien’s artwork to her teaching this year. The UNC Greensboro Assistant Professor of New Media and Design returned in August from a three-month residency in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The opportunity through the Art Station is an endeavor between the U.S. Embassy in Manana and RAK Art Foundation, established by Shaikh Rashid Al Khalifa, an artist himself.
“I love these kinds of opportunities that the U.S. State Department provides for students, professionals, and practitioners to live, work, and research in an entirely new and unfamiliar place and kind of get out of their comfort zones,” O’Brien said.
Beauty in the water
The name Bahrain — meaning “the two seas” or “of the water”— inspired her grant proposal.
“Don’t get a Bahraini started on dissecting what that means; everyone has a different opinion,” she said. Excited by those converging viewpoints and the relationship between land and water, she focused on what it means “to have water be the central focus of the country’s meaning” — especially one the size of New York City.
O’Brien notes that video and photography, her preferred mediums, excel as ways to “think about the complex, layered histories of urban planning and human intervention on the landscapes and architecture.”
Between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Gulf of Bahrain, the kingdom features freshwater springs from the Arabian aquifer located below the Gulf’s saltwater. Many springs are depleted because of industrialization and urbanization, so most drinking water is processed by desalination.
“I was fascinated by all three of these layers and whatever other layers I might encounter,” she said. “I wanted to meet everybody who had any relationship to water and capture it through video art.”
She talked with hydrologists and professors. She visited archaeological springs where older residents had learned to swim, and ancient temples locals dug to immerse themselves in the freshwater for worship.
O’Brien interviewed singers and archivists of Marathi songs, dating from an era when men went pearling, leaving women on the island for months. She found photos of pearlers diving and filling sacks with the freshwater creatures emerging from the ocean floor.
Originally, O’Brien envisioned recording formal interviews, but after arriving realized that wasn’t the way to engage nor would it provide the most information.
“Your interactions with people are shaping the way you’re thinking and working,” she said. Some of her initial ideas weren’t viable. For example, she found filming underwater difficult, but hiring someone else was cost prohibitive. The digital media producer at the Art Station, Mai Abuhendi, was one of O’Brien’s essential collaborators, as was computer science professor Hesham Al-Ammal, also a film photographer. From visiting around 18 springs and interviewing over 15 experts, O’Brien collected 60 or 70 hours of video. She’ll continue to digest her content and manifest it into art by December when she returns to Bahrain for the world premiere of the film at the Muharraq Nights arts festival.
Integrating research into her classes
In the meantime, the students in O’Brien’s “Variable Topics” course at UNCG are creating work in response to the Cape Fear River. She’s providing them with regional maps from the 1700s to present day. They’re meeting physicians, biologists and historians. They have toured a water treatment plant to see how it gets from the river to the faucet, and a wastewater treatment plant to see how the water gets from faucets to the river. They documented through notes, sound, film and conversations. Throughout the process, students will talk about the best method for telling the story they want to tell.
Integrating research into classes mirrors O’Brien’s own practice of talking to every expert and visiting every location “that has any significance related to the theme, concept or idea, and then trying to take all that information and create a complex and layered story that tells multiple perspectives from different viewpoints and kinds of expertise.”
Also a member of the Fulbright committee, O’Brien encourages students to take advantage of State Department programs, emphasizing that research isn’t limited to writing papers.
“A lot of people have a misconception of what it means to be an artist and how we generate ideas or how we synthesize information,” she said.
O’Brien sees State Department grants as opportunities for students to think about the ways their “research translates to other places and for them to continue to engage in other cultures and other communities and other lived experiences,” which “really ties back to our experiences and how much of a multicultural school we are at UNCG.”
Story by Alexis L. Richardson
Photos courtesy of Kelley O’Brien
