Darkness falls in the park, and into a black void, a Wheat Penny slowly descends into view on the left side of the enormous wall, slowly spinning and tumbling as if an astronaut in zero gravity has lost their grip on it. In due time, shards of painted porcelain plates fall through the wide frame, spinning at different speeds and rotating in different directions. The picture slowly dissolves to colorful glass marbles, glass bottles, plastic toys, nothing to scale with anything else. A tiny fragment of comb might be projected, not 20 feet wide, but 90 feet wide, rendering detail at a nearly microscopic level.
During the showing of nearly 1,000 objects, we begin to recognize groupings: round things, blue things, rusty things, tools, things made of glass, iridescent things. And since many are shown more than once, we also make friends with recurring characters: the pink frog, the bullet, always moving faster than the rest, the rusty key to a Ford, the bent spoon.
For both the artists and the objects, it has been a long and interesting journey to this wall on Waller Creek. Hubbard, who was born in Ireland and grew up in Australia, earned her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from UT in 1988. She was recruited to the Longhorn faculty in 2000 to lead a new program in digital photography and is now the William and Bettye Nowlin Professor in Photography in the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts. Birchler, a native of Switzerland, joined the department in 2018 and is a professor of practice and fellow to the John D. Murchison Regents Professorship in Art.
The two met in 1989 as artists in residence at the Banff Center for the Arts in the Canadian Rockies, where they started to collaborate. Ever since, they have been an inseparable package deal — creatively, professionally and even academically: they applied to graduate school as a collaborative team and received the first joint master’s degree in fine arts in North America (from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 1992), then an honorary doctorate from the same school in 2017. The married couple is known in the art world as “Hubbard / Birchler.” Their work on “Past Deposits…” began during 2020, but the real story long predates that.
Waller Creek, which runs south through the UT campus along San Jacinto Blvd., has been the site of extreme flooding for time out of mind, flooding made even worse with the impervious cover that comes with development. In the early 2000s, the city began taking action to control the creek along the mile that it flows through downtown. It began digging an enormous tunnel 26 feet in diameter from 12th Street to Lady Bird Lake. Any water above the normal creek level at 12th and Red River streets now drops through a massive inlet shaft and falls 70 feet into the underground tunnel, which empties into the lake.
It is standard operating procedure for the city to check for historical artifacts before beginning a major construction project. In the early 2000s, archeologists began digging in several locations in Waterloo Park, where the tunnel inlet is, and along Waller Creek. The teams uncovered and cataloged almost 1,000 artifacts dating from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
In 2020, as the Moody Amphitheater was about to be constructed, the Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, a foundation partnering with the city of Austin to create a 1.5-mile trail along Waller Creek connecting six parks, invited Hubbard and Birchler to develop a work of art to activate the amphitheater in the rejuvenated Waterloo Park.