Refining Patterns
Pen and ink wash on paper made from sugarcane combined with shredded disposable plastic waste (“plasticane”)
16’ x 31’ x 2”
2018
This drawing installation explores the legacy of extractive economies on Southern Louisiana beginning centuries ago and continuing through an age beyond us. This work questions the ways we have chosen to develop this environment, drawing connections to how we have already changed the land and imagining the ecosystems that will emerge from what we will leave behind after we have made this place uninhabitable. These drawings are on paper made from a combination of discarded Louisiana natural resources: bagasse, the byproduct of sugarcane refining and what was once a staple chattel slavery crop, and shredded un-recyclable plastic waste, a petroleum byproduct extracted in Louisiana and refined at companies like those just upriver in Cancer Alley. These petrochemical industries are located on the sites of former plantations: they pollute and poison the predominantly poor African American communities located nearby, and ultimately those downriver and downwind through the networked ecologies that bind us all together.
This installation of drawings was created for the large walls of the Isaac Delgado Fine Art Gallery at Delgado Community College to be part of the three-person show No Man’s Land with Michel Varisco and Dan Rule, which explored how our relationship with the environment on an individual and collective level has led us to where we are today and what the future for both humans and the land will look like.
