Platforms: The Teachers Among Us invited emerging and mid-career artists to nominate senior artists who have mentored, taught, or profoundly influenced their artistic journey. Following a citywide nomination and adjudication process, 20 senior artists were selected to create new works to be showcases across civic art platforms. These pieces reflect the importance of mentorship and the intergenerational relationships that helped shape Vancouver’s vibrant art scene.

The Water Woman image for Teachers Among Us is one expression of the larger, multi-year Water Woman Project. It brings together a sampling of textile scales designed by community members, a watercolour painting of chum salmon spawning in Still Creek — painted with pigments from the Colour-Me-Local Dye Garden beside Renfrew Ravine — and words about water, our ultimate teacher.

The Water Woman Project brings together community members of all ages and backgrounds with collaborating artists: Carmen Rosen of Still Moon Arts Society (lead artist), Squamish Weaver Sesemiya (Tracy Cameron), willow sculptor Willoughby Arévalo, and choreographer Isabelle Kirouac. Together, we are exploring our complex relationship to water in all its dimensions and embodying that relationship in a giant, 3-metre-tall Water Woman puppet, built from water-loving willow and other natural materials. She is being robed in a garment dyed with pigments from our local dye garden and fashioned from 1,000 textile "scales" — each inscribed by a community member with drawings and poetry expressing wonder, hope, fear, and prayer for water. When she is complete, we will flow with Water Woman through streams of people above the city's buried waterways and along the banks of its living ones, honouring their presence and their histories. Walking with Water Woman will become our community ritual to restore our sacred relationship with water, acknowledging where we humans have neglected our intertwined wellbeing, and where we need to restore our respect and care.