Undergraduate Thesis

The air was hot and laden with the smell of standing water and muck. Its density pushed everything living into a hush. I imagine that I am being watched as I float through the water by unseen creatures that are camouflaged under the glassy surface. My pulse slowed down into a sedated rhythm that mirrored the veiled black water. One foot in front of the other, sinking through the warm water into the grasp of the brisk mud. This water feels as though it draws you
inwards.

The forsaken landscape of the South Florida Everglades materializes itself in labyrinths of slow-flowing water, cypress, and sawgrass. As the grasses grow and die, living off of their own rotting, the density of the Everglades continuously grows to obscure all sound. It’s a resonance you don’t often encounter, buzzing in this heavy and charged frequency. – Quiet but simultaneously loud.

Driving my material process of finding, burying, excavating, tanging, and detangling is my need to unearth my intangible memories expanding through painting and sculpture. Through intertwining images and building a material language of my own, I am intent on listening closely to the landscape and taking the time to hear it. By mimicking the Earth’s own art-making, I am attempting to align myself between the permeable boundaries of the cerebral and tangible.

“The divide [écart] between the sensible and the spiritual is sealed at last. For a landscape ceases to be a ‘corner’ of the world. What is revealed instead, arising suddenly and whole, is the stuff of worlds, the stuff that gives rise to a world. And thus, discreetly, a place becomes a link.” – Living off Landscape Frsnçois Jullien.

By recording my sensorium through vitrification, fossilization, and erosion of materials, I approach the work with a sensitivity to the tangential happenings flowing in and around me. This merging of glass, ceramics, and painting expands how I conceptualize the senses as more than what can be perceived through sight but through the sensorial beyond.

“It was an act of separation and, as such, an invitation to reconnect.” – Andrew S. Yang.

The figures in my work become portals to the psychological landscapes of the South Florida Everglades as they find themselves rendered in changing environments and materials that are never fully knowable. Acting as vessels of memory in a forgetting world, the figures hold narratives that project them into unknown landscapes allowing them to indulge in their memories and recognize themselves. The figures balance the confluence of harmony and alienation in their environment through poetic spaces that carry the resonance of a distant kinship.I am pursuing works that are able to enter through vision and surge through the body, firing the synapses of entanglement.

Re-enchanting a static image, the work must be capable of metamorphosis and slow gestures.

The poetic formalism within the work informs the textures, colors, and light, creating a kin-centric relationship to a place that is constantly in flux. The pigments of the paint are suspended within shallow pools of water, evaporating to reveal the footprint of its flow. With water as the creative matrix, life animates itself in the material event of watercolor. The surface remembers the flow of the water; the work is a record of the pigments and sediments.

Wangechi Mutu's work references the hybridity between plants and humans; her boundless gestures defy gravity on their nonabsorbent surface. Like Mutu, I wish to create work within the earth. Chance is necessary in both. The mythologies of life and death are constantly in exchange in Kiki Smith's practice as she works across media, searching for the material language that aligns with her concepts. In Smith’s practice, she listens to the pull of the forms she pays attention to. Firelei Báez and her bodies of transition and shapeshifting allow specificity to
become open and abstract. Báez dispels the categorization and naming of the natural world. There is a process of learning exchange between the work as it lives off itself, dissolving boundaries.

The slate of limestone the land has grown cradled by has informed everything living. As water seeps through the rock, crossing thresholds and aligning itself amid opposites, it begins the process of creating an ecology. Fragments of time start the cycle of becoming tangible as moments are held in place in the work.

Footprints are a path of introspection; beneath are layers of memory.

As I paddle on my Blue Kayak down a narrow split in River Bend Park, South Florida. I watch my paddle enter the black mirrored surface of the water. As I pull it towards me, the water swirls, the reflection of the plants inhabiting the bank. It is nauseating, but kayaking here makes you feel like you should be quiet, moving slowly so as not to splash. The water feels as though it draws your attention inwards, almost as though in the suspension, you can access emotional depths within yourself, trusting that they are supporting you.

I am making an
                image that feels like a swamp

Marcia Bjornerud writes in Becoming Earthlings that the first step to dispelling the notion that geological studies and studies of the environment are about aged old objects and places that are frozen; she insists that landscapes should be seen instead as records of becoming. The world we live in is wholly animate. The intention of my work is to learn how to listen to this becoming and witness its breath through making.

The environment is more than something that simply surrounds us; it sets the condition of entanglement. We are nestled within. South Florida is a landscape of transition zones of water, a collaborative place where things become other things; it is a place that always remembers what it has absorbed. I pour, restrict, and re-carve the image to glimpse an unnoticed world.

I recall deeply personal encounters and my bond to place, rhyming images as they absorb into each other, mapping through camouflage
.