Groundwork: Art Honoring the Aquifers
Groundwork: Art Honoring the Aquifers
What lies beneath shapes what we become.
In Groundwork, textile artist and educator Gwendolyn Hustvedt presents a series of fifteen silk banners that illuminate the unseen foundations of life: underground water systems, root networks, and layers of meaning woven through geology, ecology, and myth.
Using the Serti silk painting method, Hustvedt channels the movement of dye much like the flow of water through limestone—revealing vibrant scenes inspired by the Edwards Aquifer, the San Marcos River, and the archetypal landscapes of collective memory. Each banner is paired with a deeply personal and reflective essay, offering insight into the ecological, symbolic, and emotional layers beneath the surface.
This book invites readers into a contemplative journey—across time, through sediment, and into the interior landscapes of both place and psyche.
Included in the Book:
- Full-color images of all fifteen banners
- Essays exploring aquifers, roots, fossils, fungi, myth, and memory
- Reflections on sustainable textile practices and sacred ecologies
- Narratives connecting personal experience with collective environmental realities
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Reviews
In Groundwork, Gwendolyn Hustvedt imagines Texas’ most iconic aquifer through amazing works of art. By means of a collection of painted silk banners we see an important water source as more than a natural system. We see it also as a source of meaning, memory, scientific discovery, and refugium for both common and singularly unique life. The karstic Edwards Aquifer serves as the model. It’s an underground world providing freshwater for drinking, agriculture, and industry. Yet this life-giving aquifer is also highly sensitive to human activities – benign or polluting – on the land’s surface. Sinkholes and disappearing streams feed rainwater and other liquid runoff into a maze of underground caverns, cracks, and hidden rivers running for tens of miles at depths up to two miles beneath the Texas landscape. It’s a world unseen and unseeable. Hustvedt provides a glimpse that is whimsical, yet realistically imaginative. Learners of all ages can now share her vision and consider her thoughts on this buried treasure in Groundwork.
Rudolph Rosen, Ph.D.
Director (retired) of the Texas A&M University Institute for Water Resources Science and Technology in San Antonio and former research professor at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos. He is author of the middle/high school textbook, Texas Aquatic Science, published by the Texas A&M University Press.
In her vivid silk paintings, Gwendolyn Hustvedt evokes the hidden depths of the Edwards Aquifer, a subterranean world where earth and water merge, inseparable, beneath our feet. She reveals to us vast landscapes, imaginary but for the echo of ink and silk as one, just as water is one with the ground and ourselves.
Margo Handwerker, PhD
Dean of the Glassell School of Art Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Discover Groundwork’s Inspiring Art
This gallery presents silk banners and essays revealing the hidden layers of our natural world.
