Calendar

This project focuses on the systemic extraction of resources from the land that has taken place in Pennsylvania for the last two hundred years, specifically anthracite coal and slate, and the landscapes that emerge as a result. They are an exploration of the current state of the landscape and its relationship to its own past and to our future. Much of the land in Schuylkill and Northumberland Counties was at one time heavily used for anthracite coal mining but has been largely out of use since the 1960s. The years of mining have left the landscape in a state of upheaval with its surface torn, scarred, and redistributed into rock piles, barren boulder fields, and massive craters. The remnants of the industry, however, remain and new marks are made upon the land as it is repurposed for recreational use. Overlaying the tracks of massive dump trucks and bulldozers are the smaller, delicate tracks of dirt bikes and four wheelers taking advantage of the seemingly abandoned nature of the land. We have drastically altered the land and given it a new topography that has little semblance to its former self and has remained frozen in this state long after industry left.

On the Carpet of Leaves. Humanity has continuously found the desire to create as a way of connecting to both the people and places around them. I am constantly searching to make sense of my own connection to this vast expanse of human history. I am not only concerned with formal qualities of art, but also the nonverbal communication that exists between the individual and the art that they are experiencing.