Dear Body of Water: Gretchen Ernster Henderson

December 5, 2025 – May 2, 2026

Mayer Gallery

Dear Body of Water

Pause to reorient yourself to water. Consider the source: replenishing Boone, Watauga County, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Southeastern United States. Waterways have written and rewritten this living waterscape, called by many names over time. The headwaters of the ancient New River were born millions of years ago and have flowed through countless human lifetimes. Water inscribes the landscape as a story that pools and spills and splashes in and out of range of human understandings. Water is strong enough to wear down stone, quietly regenerate earth, and dramatically take and save lives. This water flows across human bounds to join waterways in the Mississippi River Watershed, flowing over many states and provinces to the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean to join the body of water that is the Earth: our shared planetary home.

The human body is mostly water. The planet is mostly water. We are all bodies of water. I have been listening with bodies of water: from rising ocean tides to retreating landlocked seas, to monsoons gushing through arroyos, to melting snow and river runoff. Through listening beyond hearing to retune my perceptions, my practices as a writer, artist, musician, and human are shifting in concert with a more-than-human world. Part of this practice involves renewing relationships with bodies of water and inviting others into a collaborative practice of reencounter through Dear Body of Water.

Dear Body of Water invites postcard-sized love letters (both digital and mail-art) to recognize beloved rivers, oceans, aquifers, creeks, ponds, and other bodies of water to join a collective poem. Water is often treated as an inert, extractable, economic resource yet is animate and animating, interrelating human and more-than-human lives. How does water melt into histories, memories, dreams, griefs, hopes, and presence? What bodies of water are overlooked or neglected? More than water rights, can we consider rights of and for water? The act of addressing bodies of water as fellow living beings (as in, Dear Body of Water) renews senses of relational ecologies—literally, “home”—with hopes to reframe water in the climate crisis and remember: Water is our lifeblood.

Waterways flow into this exhibition to re-present moments of presence, to recounter and reconnect watersheds across states. A liquid sense of language melts and freezes across media through poetics into photographs, eco-cinema into installation, embodied and performance research, improvisatory scores and contemplative practices, stillness and movement, to invite slowing down to contemplate yourself as a body of water, among other bodies of water, in and beyond this gallery. The incompleteness invites attuning also to absences among presences: needing your perspective of water. The story of one body of water is incomplete without all bodies of water.

Over a year ago, this region was inundated by Hurricane Helene. That superstorm still weighs heavily in memory and body, leaving scars where hearts meet earth. If you were to write to Dear Hurricane Helene as a fellow living being, what would you say? Emotions of grief or anger, disbelief or despair, may still leave many of us inarticulate, blaming the past or fearing possible futures. If we re-view storm surges as expressions by an injured or hurting body of water, akin to Mother Earth, could we offer tender words of consolation and support to help and heal together? How might we treat a beloved relative or dear friend who is wounded? How might we address this and other vulnerable bodies of water from more than our limited human knowing, reconsidering the perspective of the planet? Restoring and restorying efforts around waterways might renew our relationship with bodies of water, including each other, as a chorus of care flows together with acts of repair.

Water can be a destroyer but also a healer. Health studies about blue spaces, green spaces, and time with nature can support replenishment and reconnection. Human bodies of water cannot heal if we stay separated from our blue natures. Without caring for our planetary lifeblood, we set an example of how we wish to be treated: continually extracting from and being extracted by our resourcing source of life. Water Is Life. Listen: as water drips and whispers, babbles and swirls and rushes with hurricane-force winds: screaming. What is water saying? If we cannot even listen well to human stories, what other voices are we not hearing beyond physiology that might offer more replenishment: a renewable wellspring? If you were to address a Dear Body of Water, who would you turn to, and what would you say?

Please take a moment to sit with water. Contemplate your related presence. Address a body of water about whom you care and listen with the rising tide.

Thanks to University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and the national coalition of Poets for Science for supporting Dear Body of Water. Gratitude extends to the many Tributaries (individuals) and Replenishers (communities) who have participated through collaborative WaterWays. Artworks in this exhibition were created thanks to fellowships from the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo Arts Center (CA), Artist-in-Residence program at Fallingwater (PA), Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow residency at the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts (WY), and more: dearbodyofwater.poetsforscience.org.

Gretchen Ernster Henderson

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, CHANNEL Horseneck Channel, MA, 2016

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, CONDENSE Rain on windows at Fallingwater, PA, 2024

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, CONSTELLATE Tar seep with barn owl bones, Great Salt Lake, UT, 2018

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, IMBIBE Rain on garden statue at Fallingwater, PA, 2024.E

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Installation of “Story Hatchery” from Blue Atlas at Neltje Center, University of Wyoming, WY, 2025

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, Monsoon cloud and lightning over Tucson, AZ, 2021

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, REFLECT Lower Red Rock Lake, MT, 2018

Screenshot

Listen to a 3-minute introduction as she listens with Fallingwater (http://tiny.cc/GEH_Fallingwater) and read her response to Hurricane Helene (https://poetry.arizona.edu/blog/in-the-wake-of-hurricane-helene).

About the artist

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, courtesy of Rhodes College

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a body of water, an intermedia artist, and the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Rhodes College near the Mississippi River in Memphis, TN. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), has been seeping from deserts of the West into intermedia publications, exhibitions, performances, and field practices, including the participatory prompt of Dear Body of Water (with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and national coalition of Poets for Science): inviting people to share their relationships with bodies of water. Through WaterWays, she cultivates community-engaged repertoires that blend restoring and restorying watersheds. Gretchen is grateful for recent artist fellowships from Fallingwater, Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts, and Leopold Writing Program. In 2025-2026, she is the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. Recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Brevity, Arnoldia, Orion, Landscape Architecture Plus/LA+, TSLL, and Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands. Gretchen is interested in acoustic ecologies and communal practices that sound gaps of cultural and institutional histories to facilitate participatory spaces for exchanging ways of knowing to collectively support our human and more-than-human world. Upstream and downstream, she is grateful to continually learn from and with bodies of water: the lifeblood of our shared planetary home.