I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

Frequent heavy precipitation events have resulted in devastating impacts on many rural communities and provide real-world examples of how waterways and infrastructure are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. This sweater is a representation of the Rochester embayment and infrastructure identified by the Environmental Protection Agency as vulnerable to extreme weather including the total number of underground pollutant storage tanks (335; bobbles) and permitted dischargers (31; colored squares) within the Genesee River watershed. During a flood, underground storage tanks (UST) can become damaged and release their contents into the surrounding environment, contaminating soil, surface and groundwater resources. Permitted dischargers are entities authorized under the Clean Water Act to discharge pollutants from a point source into waters of the US. The EPA is working with permittees to implement measures to adapt to climate change to mitigate the effects of extreme weather.

This was improvised based on a very basic drop shoulder sweater (4 rectangles) with a neck added. I did the bobbles with crochet rather than knitting because they were so much faster that way. The darker squares were sewn on afterwards.

This piece was created in association with a short-term artist residency supported by the Institute for Human Health and the Environment at the University of Rochester in which we used Wool and Water to explore the connections between water and human health.