Evelyn Rydz
April 8, 2025
A constant in Evelyn Rydz’s art practice is her deep reverence for water. For the Triennial, Evelyn examines how caring for local water bodies can be an entry point to community care. We spoke with Evelyn about the participatory nature of her work, the project’s site-specificity at Lot Lab, and how water functions not just as subject matter, but as a medium itself.
Your work typically includes participatory elements. Why is that an important aspect of your practice?
Participatory projects are an ongoing part of my work, whether as the main project or accompanying an installation. I think some of it is rooted in my long practice as an educator and my love for bringing people together to create spaces of generosity, welcoming, and belonging.
I love to host community participatory projects. For example, Comida Casera—which means "food from home" or "comfort food" is a project I started in my backyard in 2016. The multigenerational gatherings bring people together across divides to share stories and dishes honoring the people and places that have shaped their sense of home. The project evolved into a series of multidisciplinary installations with programming centered on ancestral food, community, and the future of home.
Water is another consistent element within your work. How have you incorporated the different relationships people can have with water into your work?
Water and our complex relationships to it—from everyday reliance, to human impacts and threats, to deep reverence—are central to my work. In much of my practice, I have used water as a main subject, but also as a tool and material. For example, at the ICA, I created Salty > Sour Seas, a participatory project using water from the Boston Harbor and pH test paper to bring visibility to ocean acidification. I also created very sour phytoplankton popsicles as a point of departure for conversations around carbon cycles, unexpected sour tastes, and unwanted acidification of oceans.
More recently, in a participatory project at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, part of the Water Stories exhibition, I froze water from Fresh Pond, a source of drinking water for Cambridge, and pigmented it with algae and sediment. Participants were invited to share stories of water as connective, healing, and sacred, while making a collaborative painting with the pigmented ice to cut and take pieces home.
I can’t help but see the relationship between the individual and the collective show up in your work's inclusion of both conceptual and material elements of the natural world.
For my Triennial project, I'm focusing on our relationships to local water bodies, often perceived as individual, or specific to one community. We have personal histories with specific bodies of water connected to place, and at the same time, the water is in constant motion, connecting places, ecosystems, and communities. I am designing my Triennial project with a visual emphasis on water as interconnected, especially in Charlestown at the point where the Mystic and the Charles merge in the Boston Inner Harbor, becoming part of global waterways.
Changes in one watershed have ripple effects on other watersheds. A focus of my project is hydrologic cycles and the ecological impacts of stormwater runoff and pollutants on the health of local rivers and their ecosystems.
There's a rich resonance between how you speak about care for communities and how you describe care for bodies of water.
Care is something that emerges in the process of making my work and in what I hope to make visible within the work itself. I’m very interested in how things are made and designed, our relationships with one another, and with the natural world.
In my practice, close and careful observation can be a means of drawing attention or bringing visibility. In participatory projects, this is often done through active listening and making space for multiple experiences and perspectives.
Care can mean zooming in on something, whether it be through drawing or looking closely under a microscope, or zooming out to consider something on a geologic scale. I hope this new project and its related public programming will offer moments of pause and reflection on what we choose to protect, sustain, and cultivate for future generations.
How does your research inform your practice?
Research guides and inspires a lot of my practice. I try to take a deep dive into a subject, often focusing on a local ecosystem and how it intersects with the built environment. For my Triennial project, I'm focusing on the industrial histories of the Mystic and the Charles and the current and ongoing threats facing those bodies of water. I’ve learned a lot through recent conversations with local watershed experts.
I enjoy creative challenges, especially designing projects that respond to a particular place, its characteristics, history, and ecology. I hope my project creates a space for reflection, and will be an open invitation to engage, to look closely, and to pause.
How do you think the public nature of your Triennial project will enhance a visitor’s experience?
In many ways, my project is a visual proposal. What happens when we remove manicured lawns or impervious surfaces? What other possibilities for growth could there be? How can we hold, absorb, and store water through natural filters? How can we support the health of river ecosystems and the communities they connect?
A major component of the project is that it will be continuously growing and reflecting something new, creating ongoing change. It will be responsive to the site with a grouping of climate-resilient plants representing the past, present, and future of what is native to the site. I'm thinking a lot about what resilience means in relation to community and a changing environment.
As a local artist, what are you excited to see from the Triennial in Boston this year?
I'm excited to see Boston activated through public art projects across the city. My project will be on the Lot Lab site with two other local artists, Alison Croney Moses and Andy Li. I’ve loved being in conversation with them throughout the process and am looking forward to sharing my work alongside theirs.