When artist Erin Elder went searching for the headwaters of Monument Creek, she wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. Would the water source — around which Army General William Jackson Palmer founded the city of Colorado Springs in 1871— be a geyser? Or would it be a small waterfall coming from cracks in the rock?
“I was so surprised to find that it didn't shoot out of the ground. It didn't drip. It pooled, actually,” Elder said. “It was impossible to see the exact spot that it came out of the ground.”
The 27-mile stream, flowing from the mountains northwest of the city, grew smaller and smaller as she ascended to its source on Mount Deception, until it reached a swampy meadow where water seeped from the earth.
That realization was one of the many ways Elder is meditating on the history and significance of Monument Creek for a multiplatform exhibition she’s preparing as an artist in residence at Colorado College.
It’s a project she hopes can cut through polarized conversations as the state’s second-largest city examines its water resources in an increasingly arid West.
“[It] is no longer just a ‘woo-woo’ thing to talk about. I think water, the idea that we are connected to water — that we depend on water — is an essential truth that cuts through all of those cultural divides and social polarities,” she said.
Her project, entitled “From Source to Mouth,” will unfold in multiple ways throughout the rest of the year, culminating in an exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in September. From recorded oral histories, to her own watercolor paintings, to an interactive map of the creek’s entire length, Elder wants to show the body of water’s multifaceted character as it moves from natural settings, through agricultural lands to industrial canals and beyond.
“Creeks are so interesting, right? I mean, they are an ever-changing entity by nature,” said Iddo Aharony, an assistant professor of music at Colorado College..
Students in Aharony’s “Environment and Sound” class recently completed recording more than a dozen soundscapes at locations chosen by Elder along Monument Creek. Those soundscapes — bits of natural sounds from around the creek — will be incorporated into the interactive map and will feature in the fall exhibition.
Underlining the “ever-changing” nature of the creek, the soundscapes ended up much different than Aharony or the students were expecting, as the days they made their recordings came during unprecedented regional rainfall and flooding in mid-June. On top of that, each student group took different approaches — pointing microphones in different directions and varying how close they were to the creek, all leading to very different experiences for the listener.
“That's where Erin's work and the idea of recording the creek in different ways becomes attractive, both to expose people to the creek who might not know it,” Aharony said, “but also those who might think they know it and perhaps sort of take it for granted or have stopped asking questions about it.”
For Elder, she noted that flooding in Monument Creek has been a prominent part of Colorado Springs’ history, leading generations of city engineers to divert the waters into the sort of straight concrete canals that modern planners now work to undo.
“If we let the creek do its natural magic, then the human industrial aspects don't have to work so hard to clean it,” she said.
The cleanliness of Monument Creek, or lack thereof, has for a long time soured the stream’s reputation in the city. Trash still spills from abandoned homeless camps into the creek along much of its length.
Yet, concerted efforts in recent years have led to a turnaround in the creek’s ecosystem as it flows into Fountain Creek, which runs into the Arkansas River, down to the Mississippi and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.
“That journey, to me, is a really fascinating thing to imagine,” Elder said.
Editor's Note: Colorado College holds the license for KRCC, which is operated by Colorado Public Radio.
