Concluded September 2019 with thanks to City of Calgary leak locators Kelly Pyke and Chris Steffan, and City fabricator Brent L’Heureaux. Special thanks to Sans Facon and City of Calgary public art and to Ash from d.ust design.

In 2013, Calgary suffered a catastrophic flood. Flow produced by extreme rain conditions caused extensive damage. While the flood was anticipated and managed well, it generated trauma for householders and anxiety about the future environment.

The City was already using public art to convey aspects of their work to the public but inspired managers recognised that public art could generate dialogue between the public and the City, particularly around water management. Watershed plus, a programme led by artists Sans Facon with City public art and water staff, devised a new programme called The Dynamic Lab. This was focused entirely on water and involved the commission of five artists to develop new work for Calgary.

Becky Shaw was commissioned to explore Calgarian’s emotional attachment to their manmade and industrial water infrastructure. Shaw undertook periods of research including exploring the vast scale of the water infrastructure, identifying ways that invisible water flow is measured and visualised, and deploying her children as ‘water tourists’ to explore how Calgary’s water shapes cultural life.

This City-wide scale of research was then counterbalanced with a focus on the work of the City’s leak locators: a small, expert workforce, continually on the road to locate leaks for repair. Through time spent with leak locators, the research focused on their use of the globe geophone - an analogue instrument used to listen for leaks 3m below ground.

Shaw wanted to focus on the ‘leak’ as not only a political, environmental and economic problem, but also a ‘rupture’ that offers a metaphorical possibility of escape and enlivening. In thinking about a leak as an emotional outburst, Shaw and the leak locators experimented with pushing pop music through the water system, seeing this as both contaminant and joyous breach.

Shaw also experimented with putting her body through the water system, by attempting to put a limb in every different size pipe used for the water infrastructure in the City stores. Responding to the above, a child-size geophone was ‘milled’ out of an adult-sized one by City engineers, changing its pitch, reach and the intensity of listening. Adult and children’s instruments were trialled with public and staff. As a counterpoint, a printed City of Calgary services manual book was taken apart and rebuilt into a 6m2 map where staff could see the scale of the City, their own water services, and choose their own individual ‘dirty music’ as an imaginary contaminant in the sterile, collective drinking water system.

The work concluded in an exhibition where map and ‘mini-geophone’ were brought together and also used as ‘props’ for two live works in the form of guided tours to City neighbourhoods. The tours used an artists’ publication as a prop, script, map and souvenir.

How Deep is your Love? is an experiment in scale, seeking to compress together the whole of the City water system and City expanse and the intimate encounter of listening. By thinking about scale in this way Shaw also questions our expectations about the scale and visibility of public art - the work is both enormous and tiny, present through people’s experiences of listening and invisible.