flowing water

In his work as a landscape artist and custom watershaper, Robert Nonemaker often uses rills – small channels that simply and gracefully move water from one place to another – to bring interesting rhythms and harmonies to his garden spaces. Although these features tend to be less than assertive, he notes, the way water moves through their narrow slots can do wonders when it comes to adding depth and detail to watershape designs.

The Subtlest Flows

My dictionary defines a rill as a small stream cut by erosion. In the practice of watershaping, however, that colorful little word has been stretched to cover manufactured channels in which we artfully move water from one place to another. These often-subtle effects have a history dating at least to the 5th Century BC, when Persian kings demonstrated their power over nature by using rills to bring water – a symbol of fertility as well as a practical means of cooling architectural spaces – from rivers and aqueducts to their palaces. These early rills were observed and adopted by Muslim designers and engineers who rose to eminence in the Middle East more than a millennium later and were carried along as Islamic influence spread through India, North Africa and, eventually, Spain, where signature elements of Moorish architecture are still seen today in the famous

For more than two decades, California artist Rafe Affleck has been combining the crisp rigidity of stainless steel with the shimmering reflectivity of flowing water to create a substantial and distinctive body of work. His sculptures, in which liquid is much, much more than a mere accent to metal, grace dozens of commercial, public and private spaces, in every case making bold statements that puzzle, delight, sooth or inspire those who pass by.

Liquid Mettle

From the beginning of my career as a sculptor, I've mostly given myself over to two simple elements - metal and water - and have tried to develop approaches that turn one into an extension of the other. I like the sense that a sheet of flowing water completes the simple stainless steel shapes I create. I also like to play with illusion by creating the impression that the water appears to come from nowhere. And I like getting involved in the hydraulics of laminar flow by making the water emerge from steel as a smooth, cohesive sheet. In a sense, I draw constant inspiration from