Holy Water Fountain Pens

Water is the conduit that life flows through and is innately venerated by every living organism.

This collection of sacred water is foraged from holy wells and fonts, from sacred swamps and bogs, from oceans and seas so vast that they pull towards the moon. They hold the bodies of the microbes that thrive in those niches.

My favorite is the fountain pen filled from ephemeral pools of rain water in upturned mushroom caps because they contain microbes carried up from the soil, rained down from the sky and washed from the canopy.

These pens have been continuously topped up from sacred sites, and used in my drawings for several years. They have been blessed by priests, shaman & naturalists. They are constantly changing – the Rust Fountain holds feral apple vinegar that corrodes bits of iron found in forests; it saddens (darkens) the inks it mixes with. The copper oxide pen is actively oxidizing and is always a different shade of blue green.

By separating these vials into categories of provenance, despite their fungibility and their inevitable return to the global hydrosphere, the sacredness of all water becomes obvious. By holding the often overlooked or banal in a venerating vessel, the divine that flows through everything becomes easily seen.