MCLA Gallery 51

women Walking to Water:

a wilderness mindset convening

Suzi Banks Baum, Brece Honeycutt, Melanie Mowinski, Sarah Pike,
Lori Spencer, and Jessica Yurkofsky

On View | February 7 - March 28, 2025

Film Screening | February 26, 7pm | 49 Main Street
Panel & Conversation | March 26, 5:30pm | 49 Main Street

Women Walking to Water features the work of six artists, created in response to regular walks to a mountain cold swimming/dipping hole in the Greylock range foothills.  To practice Wilderness Mindset, you begin with self as subject and researcher. Then, you deliberately place yourself into spaces that challenge and force acceptance of the unpredictability of the present moment. This practice of presence, when paired with walking can assuage longing, loss, a whole host of things through connection to the earth.  
  
Within this mindset Melanie Mowinski convened a group of women once a month, from May through October in a private performance consisting of walking to a mountain swimming hole. Each participant dipped, played, and sometimes even soaked in the water that ranged in temperature from 45-65F. Dipping into cold water challenges and forces acceptance. It's impossible to think of anything else. After dipping, we walked back to share a meal and conversation. At each convening, Mowinski served as interlocutor, providing a different question and readings to center each conversation around her idea of Wilderness Mindset, a framework for engaging with the uncomfortable and the unknown. She asked how is Wilderness Mindset: 
• A tool to recenter the soul?  
• A process to help release reaching?  
• A way of reframing fear?  
• A feminist reclaiming of freedom?  
• Eco-theological and an invitation to redefine dominion?  
• How is ALL OF THIS about BECOMING?  
  
Something happened within this regular convening and conversation of women.  Every participant identifies as an artist. Mediums range from paper, to drawing, textiles, and printmaking. As the months progressed, the participants realized that the practice of going into water was showing up in the artistic works we were creating. This exhibition showcases this work, as well as a print exchange created specifically for this exhibit.