Category: Art

[2023] every which way is a collection of printmaking, cyanotype, and textile studies relating to my MFA research on mapping, landscape, memory, and the Buffalo Bayou.

The cyanotype work refers directly back to the Buffalo Bayou, using bayou water in the cyanotype chemistry and digital negatives made from tree rubbings collected along the beginning and endpoints of the bayou. Found objects such as driftwood, shells, bottle caps join Polaroid photos as an archival document of a specific moment in the bayou’s history.

The monoprints examine the embodiment of memory and the shape they might take. Mounting the almost weightless kozo paper onto plywood alludes to the futile gesture of attempt to hold onto memories. 

The suspended soft sculptures are a visualization of memory, taking shape in found plywood and secondhand textiles, tightly bound with wire and various types of threads.

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[2023] slacken + swell is a visual story of the Buffalo Bayou—an accumulation of time, history, and place. Buffalo Bayou is roughly 18,000 years old; a sleepy river of water that quietly supports diverse ecosystems, often going unnoticed until the wind shepherds in the next big storm. Over the past 100 years, history shows how the bayou has been shaped, molded, enforced, contained, and framed into a body of water that now serves our economic interests more than our natural ones. slacken + swell is a meditation on reciprocity between humans and their landscape. 

Having spent much of my life near these ecosystems, I acknowledge our complicated relationship with the natural world, acting as both keepers and destroyers. This installation explores how the land holds memory and the possibility of preserving these recollections. Plants found along the bayou are crystallized, acting as a unique medium for capturing fleeting moments in time. The choice to frame (and not frame) suggests the attempt to contain both the water and the wilderness. The layering that exists within the installation acts as a way to conceal while also indicating the landscape’s depth of history just beneath the surface. The hyper-saturated, toned, fixed, and unfixed cyanotypes signify the expanse of water and the interventions employed to contain it. Individual pieces come together to form a melancholic aesthetic of comfort and angst, life and decay, severance and union. 

slacken + swell invites viewers to meditate on the reciprocity between individuals and their environment, fostering a deeper appreciation of the intricate interplay between humans and nature.

[2023] Untitled (Atkinson Island)

Atkinson Island is a uninhabited Island in the Houston Ship Channel that was once owned by Conoco, but was “donated” to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in the 80s. Very little information is found online or in libraries about the island or its history, which I found to be both mysterious and questionable. Using tulle and black marks to depict the missing information, I tired to piece together the story of this mysterious island.

[2023] and yet and yet and yet and yet This project tells the story of the way I long for the local ecology of the Texas coast. I honed in on the Houston Ship Channel because of its proximity, and it also gave me a chance to learn more about the local ecosystem. My research led me down paths of different types of pollution and how it affects local ecosystems and the people who inhabit them. The more research I did, the more I felt both helpless and anxious. The resulting installation is my reaction to these feelings. Using many layers of imagery, I am able to visualize the anxious feelings, layered onto the wall much like how I have so many tabs open on my computer with all this research staring back at me. Using scale to tell this story represent the all-consuming feeling I have when I go visit the sites that occupy the spaces around the heavy industrial zones. The color choices reflect some of the colors found, or what one should find, along the coast, bright blue skies, green coastal prairies, golden sunsets.