Four Floods and Drawing for a City Public
2021
cedar, cast aluminum, came glasswork, wild foraged ceramic, rainwater, shadow
A faceted glass monocle attached to cast aluminum hoop sits hangs off the top of a 13-foot cedar pole in the middle of a public sculpture park in Dallas, Texas. Four handbuilt ceramic vessels whose form is something between an “X” and a flower have been embedded into the ground, serving as repositories for rainwater. Small ecologies of insects and worms are attracted to the vessels. As the vessels drain over time, they slowly water the grass around them.
The X form mimics the X’s that pedestrians and tourists risk their lives to spray paint on the road where JFK was shot before smiling for photo-ops in the middle of the road. Because the sun, the rain, and the rubber friction of tires wears away at the makeshift memorial, there are actually multiple X’s at any given time, fresh ones painted over fading ones, as if the site of the murder is ever-shifting depending on the public’s whims.
This work is an amalgamation and distillation of these kinds of patterns--the form, materiality, and spatial dynamics at plat within the architectures of civic tourism in Dallas, Texas. The glass monocle is a shallow, two-dimensional rendition of the Reunion Tower’s transluscent “Geo Dome” , where tourists are invited to have a cocktail at the rotating bar overlooking the Trinity Floodplain--a site where
The ceramic vessels which fill with rainwater are inspired by the Trinity Floodplain, which is a proven flood risk for the surrounding neighborhoods while also being a beacon of local biodiversity and tourism. The “X” forms references the act of geographical location, while also referencing the Made while attending Sweet Pass Sculpture School--a residency program focused on Blackland Prairie ecology