Martha Nance’s Waterwords is a series of abstract images of water and light taken outside her office in Minneapolis.
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, my phone, bored from sitting on a desk in Minneapolis as its physician owner raced from room to room seeing patients all day, went out for a breath of fresh air.
It was struck by the limitless expressions of light, movement and color hidden in the burbling water of a fountain outside her office, and even more surprised to find that it could, by stopping time, reveal textures and details that we humans would miss, distracted as our eyes are, by the bulk flow of the water.
It remained for me to extract and identify the ideas hidden in the photographs, which was an enjoyable process.
I was initially struck by the white stringy lines that appear in many of the images, which my brother the mathematician tells me are called “caustics”, something to the effect of lines of maximal reflection of light off the water.
I called them waterwords. Some of the photographs contain words, some are comments, and others describe feelings.
Martha Nance
Martha Nance is a physician in Minnesota who is at times an opportunistic photographer. She mostly photographs small living creatures in her yard, the 25 or so species of dragonflies that live or come there being her favorite subjects. But abstract photographic art is also of interest! Her photographs have been published in such journals as The Tiny Seed Journal, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, the Raw Art Review, and Northwest Review, among others.