In From Source to Mouth, artist Erin Elder takes a multifaceted, community-sourced approach to researching Monument Creek in Colorado Springs.
This article is part of our Finding Water in the West series, a continuation of the ideas explored in Southwest Contemporary Vol. 7.
COLORADO SPRINGS—What stories can water tell? According to artist Erin Elder, it depends on who you ask. Elder has set out to explore the narratives of water through a community-sourced creative research project about Monument Creek, a 27.2-mile stream that runs through her hometown of Colorado Springs.
Monument Creek originates at Mount Deception, flowing south through the towns of Palmer Lake and Monument, before uniting with Fountain Creek in Colorado Springs. The confluence connects with the Arkansas River, then the Mississippi, eventually making it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Elder points out that Colorado Springs is the only major city in the West not built on a river. That makes smaller bodies of water even more vital to the city’s survival.
“It was historically an intermittent creek,” Elder says. But after a destructive flood in 1935, the creek was “channelized” to encourage the rapid flow of water out of the city. “Now, there is a lot more water flowing through than there ever was historically. It’s a very managed, controlled, and monitored body of water.”
For the project From Source to Mouth, Elder weaves together geology, hydrology, ecology, land use, and history, as well as personal memory and sensory awareness to present different aspects of Monument Creek. From Source to Mouth is supported by Colorado College, where Elder is an Innovator in Residence with the Creativity and Innovation Department from 2021 to 2023.
From Source to Mouth can be hard to define because it is so multifaceted, but it aims to explore Monument Creek through a variety of lenses.
“It’s a creative project, and I think that’s important to note because it’s different from how a scientist, a historian, or a government person would build a project,” Elder says. “But it does involve a lot of people who come from those kinds of fields. I have been talking with folks who are working with habitat conservation, and people who run the utilities department, people in city government.”
These explorations will eventually produce a collection of oral histories, student-generated interviews and soundscapes, and Elder’s gouache “field drawings” of sites along the creek. It will also host the body of research that Elder has gathered, including essays and articles.
“Oh! And there’s also going to be a digital story map,” Elder adds. “It’s important to me to capture some of that complexity of what a creek means to a community.”
Elder is an Albuquerque-based artist, writer, and curator who studied curatorial practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She is now marrying her artistic practice with her curatorial experience in this community-sourced project that she says operates within an “expanded definition” of art.
In collecting the oral histories, Elder has stuck to the same seven or eight questions that ask subjects about their personal connections to the creek, in addition to what they know about it.
“The most challenging question is ‘Who is the creek for? Who belongs and who doesn’t?’” Elder says. “Somebody who is working as a microbiologist and thinking about water-borne viruses might answer that very differently than someone who works for the police department and is trying to move unhoused folks out of the creek.”
In presenting From Source to Mouth, Elder hopes to do more than just lend space to diverse perspectives on Monument Creek. A broader goal is to support community partners in producing events that will be shared under the umbrella of the project, such as a From Source to Mouth tour of a wastewater treatment plant.
“Art has the potential to bring a different kind of curiosity,” Elder explains. “A lot of the partners that I’m working with are really excited for that dynamic, that it brings a different kind of interest to what they’re already doing.”
Erin Elder’s exhibition From Source to Mouth will open at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College on September 1, 2023, and runs through November 10.
