In 2018, I spent a week walking the receding beaches of the 200-mile long barrier islands that make up the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I was looking for signs of global warming along the coast of my home state, taking photographs, collecting shore debris, and engaging in conversation with locals who had lived there for decades. As I navigated this disappearing sliver of American geography, my ideas about artistic purpose in the 21st century were most challenged in talks with coastal community members. Some people expressed a fearful understanding that biodiversity loss and rising sea levels were transforming their landscape, while others dismissed the threat of climate change to their livelihoods. These interactions have shaped critical investigations of my artwork: how can the imaginative potential of artistic inquiry help us adapt to climate change? And how will this artistic offering unify people of distinct lived experiences?
My interdisciplinary artistic practice grapples with these questions through synthesis of community-based processes and object making that respond to public histories and environmental concerns. I make objects to organize space for close reflection between individuals that may document the reflection itself or reimagine behavior and landscape. These sculptural objects span documentary, site-specific, and socially engaged ways of making, also incorporating speculative design. At various moments, my artistic thinking has been guided by the work of Mary Mattingly, Theaster Gates, Caroline Woolard, Trevor Paglen, Doris Salcedo, and Ann Hamilton, all of whom have challenged me to consider artmaking as a site of political and emotional archaeology.
In several of my projects, my research involves examination of material culture within archives to investigate memory and identity developed around environmental crises. These projects have often been realized collaboratively by working with peers, researchers, and community institutions to build entryways into scientific and historical analyses. My documentary photography of the field research conducted by the UNC-CH Carbonshed Lab, a research team investigating the cycling of nutrients in local Chapel Hill watersheds, became a series of testimonial artifacts to overlooked streams. Likewise, a collaboration with the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab at North Carolina State University and the town of Princeville, North Carolina produced a book transcribing the oral history of the life of a town resident before and after Hurricane Matthew. In these partnerships, the artistic products are instances of collective knowledge-making which are returned to collaborators to be used as personal or organizational resources.
As a graduate student in sculpture at Queens CUNY, I want to continue exploring art as climate action with mentors like Chloe Bass and Gregory Sholette. Both of these professors are distinctly committed to an inclusive, interdisciplinary practice that examines art as a tool of intervention. My research will remain focused on listening to the subjectivities of human responses to climate change, while making with greater material awareness and alignment with solidarity economics. The investigation of how predominant ideologies, mainly capitalism, politically manufacture narratives about consumption and power will be critical to this making framework. By repairing and repurposing found materials to provide sustainable mechanisms of
emotional and practical support under climate change, I intend use graduate school as a place to resettle my practice in a circular economy based on mutual aid.