Brooklyn-based artist Dylan Gauthier is the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s first artist-in-residence, and he has been tasked with examining the intersection of art and nature.

Gauthier has been commissioned to embark on a year-long environmental art project that will trace the Brandywine River from its headwaters in Honey Brook Township, to its mouth at the convergence of the Brandywine and Christina rivers in Wilmington – water that eventually flows into the Delaware River.

From June 2016 until July 2017, Gauthier will be embedded in the Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art’s staff, fostering a dialogue between the Conservancy’s acclaimed group of riparian restoration, mapping, and easement experts and the museum’s curators and educators.

Gauthier will serve as a catalyst between these two distinct fields combined within the Brandywine’s dual missions.

The artist’s project, highwatermarks: six ways of sensing the river, engages with the Brandywine as a public waterway and investigates the relationships between image and landscape, policy and ecology, community and conservation, and culture in the Brandywine Watershed.

The project springs from the fact that the Brandywine connects diverse communities that rely on the river for drinking water, irrigation, and recreation. highwatermarks performs as a micro-level investigation of macro issues affecting rivers and streams throughout the world.

Gauthier’s residency will be divided into six modules, each focused around a specific theme and mode of sensing: drifting, observing, gathering, charting, sensing, and distributing. These modes transition from states of direct communication between the artist and the landscape to more abstracted and even virtual forms of interaction with the river and its surrounding communities.

Click here to read more about Gauthier’s residency at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.