To Reside Unsettled.
MFA Thesis Exhibition, Feb. 12-15 2020.
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, North Philadelphia PA
If one is in constant motion, traveling between geographies and borders and homes, how does this itinerant state shape one’s relationship to land?
Hybrid forms of sails, boats, wings, bones, fish, fences, deserts and oceans describe a stake in interconnectivity that I understand to be necessary when acknowledging and caring for our systems of interdependence. Drawing upon my own experiences, I aim to tease apart the relationship between travel, land, and human constructs (architecture, fields, fences, borders). Notions of belonging and ownership, and the uncertainty of the term ‘home’, are component parts of this exploration.
This body of work derives from the sensation of leaving and returning from the place where my family lives, at the end of a dirt road in south Texas. We have a garden there, and family in the ground. The immediate region is demarcated by barbed wire fences and paths where the cows have pressed their collective weight into the earth. Further out are widening highways and the stifling of land with cement, made evident by 2017 Hurricane Harvey’s still-reverberating impact upon this place and within my body. I am tied to this place, even when residing elsewhere. To address the violence and care that exists within this complex, constructed relationship is to then ask: what is my responsibility to this place, and what form could a more responsive engagement with our land actually look like?
(This body of work derives from grappling with the choice to leave in the aftermath of a disaster).
