Seep, 2020

Third Coast Disrupted: Artists and Scientists on Climate at the Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago.  screening, abaca paper pulp, salvaged plastic water bottles, beeswax, 24’ long x 6’8” high x 1’6” deep

An exhibition of newly commissioned artworks culminating a yearlong conversation between seven artists and seven scientists centered on climate change impacts and solutions in the Chicago region.

This work formed around a question: Can the earth, the atmosphere, and the multitude of earth-bound organisms “digest” what humans generate from an increasingly toxic industrial complex? I am referencing the escalating use of plastic and the pervasive and perverse trail it leaves throughout the earth’s ecosystem. 

As plastic breaks down, the microscopic particulates it leaves behind are now found within all parts of the environment. They are so embedded within our life support systems as to be inseparable from them. These sculptures reference the body systems that allow us to absorb food, water, and air, all of which have been found to harbor surprisingly large amounts of micro plastics.  

The forms are made from manipulating screening and plastic water bottles picked up off the streets of my neighborhood, the detritus and poison of our Anthropocene epoch.

My process of construction mirrors how plastics in daily life become implanted into the organic world that we function within.

Lobby of 353 North Clark, Chicago, 2017-2018

Installation of three sculptures:
Column (85” x 19” x 23”),
Breach 2 (15” x 75” x 30”)
and Breach 3 (20” x 21” x 34”)

Network, 2017

Ropes made from repurposed materials by members of the library community in a series of eight workshops span a space between 12 columns in the atrium library (approximately 49’  x 13’) .  Barrington Area Library, Barrington, IL.  The project was co-sponsored by the Library and Barlett Tree Experts, and organized by Christine Esposito at Terracom.

The branched wooden columns of the Barrington Library’s soaring atrium generated a strong reference to the hallowed space of a forest, as well as to Peter Wholleben's book The HiddenLife of Trees.  The book reveals what we cannot see: that is, how trees within ancient forests function as a unit as they communicate through beneficial fungi living symbiotically at the root tips.  In a similar way, a library develops a mutually beneficial relationship with its community.

The Barrington Area Library is sited next to a forest and is a strong connector in the village in which it functions, connecting different categories of information and knowledge with various populations of people. For the making of Network, used materials were collected from the community to be repurposed into ropes.  Materials included: video and audio tapes, fabrics, string from hay bales, drawings and posters, etc.  The process of making these ropes with different people coming to the workshops was an opportunity for participants to network with others in the community.  

Both the library and the interconnected root systems of trees compete for resources within their own community or environment. Ultimately, each of these systems works together as an organism for survival, providing us with a model for sustainable human culture. Network is an embodiment of these ideas.

link to barrington library unveiled

Folded Terrain, 2012

Folded Tyvek Installation (14’ x 14’ x 7’); Halsted Street, Pilsen neighborhood, Chicago, IL.

As the film Between the Folds suggests, folding involves compaction and expansion and is found in many places and scales in our lives.  Geologic strata fold to create mountains, proteins in the brain, airbags in our car, the petals of a flower all fold or unfold as they function.  It is a means
to make a compact form out of something voluminous and to create three-dimensional structure from a flat plane of material.  

Folded Terrain, a temporary installation in a storefront window in Pilsen’s historic neighborhood, was an opportunity to explore work–in-progress for ASCENDance where the structures existed on their own without movement. During an evening performance, dancers performed in the window installation activating the space.

Photography: Jyoti Srivastava

Split Sycamore, 2005

Welded steel structure (7’ x 20’ x 10’); Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN.

Split Sycamore, installed on the new campus of the Herron School of Art, emerged from a wide split in the trunk of a sycamore tree located in front of the building.  As the name implies, it was intended to embody the energy of the tree and activate a space around it.  As the larger section of two welded-steel forms spiraled out of the split, a smaller section countered that movement, spiraling out in a different direction and on a different axis.

Wave, 2004 and 2005

Two welded steel structures (7’ x 25’ ea.); 55th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, Chicago, IL.

Wave is a site-specific installation for the City of Chicago’s Park District for the purpose of creating structures and plantings to interact with each other on two pre-existing kidney shaped, annual flowerbeds, each 70 feet long in the median at 55th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

The median is an island viewed from a distance, either by car from the street or while crossing the street by foot.  The forms of the plantings derived from ebb and flow patterns in water.  Rhythm and punctuation came from altering the height and texture of the plants.  Movement occurred both within the beds, as well as through the season, as the plants grew and developed.

Two pairs of curved steel trellises were built and anchored in the beds, their structure evolving from forms of waves.  The curves emphasized the flow of traffic around the median and echoed the shape of the planted beds.  Plantings were designed to emerge out of (and, ultimately, to cover) the steel structures in the summer.  When the plants died back in the winter, the trellis structures floated on the surface of the ground like interlaced branches.