Plumbing The Divide
Jade Steven
Wood, Multiple Kinds of Paint, Plastic Product, Insulation Foam, Oil Pastel, American Dirt, Clay, PVC, Tobacco, Cotton Balls, PVC Piping, Patriotic Lights, One Toilet.
Digging ditches for my grandfather’s plumbing business made me appreciate what people are capable of through labor: building homes, memories, and systems. Yet those efforts—especially the kind that often go uncelebrated—are the very work that makes systems like our government function properly. They are networks that, when working perfectly, no one notices, but when they fail, they become crises.
In Plumbing The Divide I use plumbing as a metaphor to explore political discourse in our current society, where we are responsible for the shared infrastructure of communication that serves as the foundation of our democracy. Plumbing is a public utility, yet it is a fragile system that requires maintenance and responsible use. Political discourse functions very similarly: it routes and sanitizes cultural waste, depends on collective stewardship, and collapses when left to rot or when it is abused.
The installation consists of a painted triptych mirroring our polarized discourse, a toilet overflowing with ideological blockage, and interconnected PVC piping resembling a broken conversational conduit. These materials reference labor while exposing the nastier side of patriotism. At our feet sits the preamble of the Constitution—a promise we quite literally piss on.
So, what should America do? Well, I think we need to shit or get off the pot. We are in this together. We are more than our political parties. We are disenfranchised and disconnected, and our actions are what we ultimately flush through our system. The damage is done. Now we need plumbers.
We need to fix this. We need to remove the clogs, and that may mean replacing pipes, toilets, and even our septic systems within the structure of American civility. Or at the very least, we need to stop pouring grease down the damn pipes.
