For nearly forty years, volunteers with the Wisconsin DNR’s Citizen Lake Monitoring Network have lowered a simple black-and-white disk into their lakes until it disappears from sight. The depth where it vanishes is a measure of water clarity, and alongside it they record the water’s color — blue, green, yellow, brown, or red. Over a thousand people a year do this, on lakes across the state, most of them without recognition. Their readings are one of the longest-running public science efforts in Wisconsin.

Common Water invites everyone else into that record. Pick your lake, find its color category, and answer a few quick questions about how you know it. Your tile is painted in the color volunteers recorded for that water, and marked with your own answers — what you do there, how it looks to you, whether you’d eat a fish from it. Every tile holds one person’s connection to one lake.

Together, those tiles become a shared artwork, unveiled in spring 2027 at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

Common Water is a project by Ian Escher Vierck, an interdisciplinary designer. Web development in collaboration with Kadence Neuens.

The project is supported by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Wisconsin Science Festival, and University of Wisconsin Sea Grant.