Materials: Cotton cloth, clay, honey, eucalyptus dye, black walnut tannin, 3D printed bha biodegradable filament, Luria Broth Agar
I witness and record the patterns of your growth. I examine and untangle your winding paths and quiet spaces. I interpret your movements and offer you my own. I create an environment for you to grow, and I know that one day soon, you’ll be wiped from this terrain—only to be reconstituted once more. So I experience São Luís. I ran your dirt roads, climbed your hills, and met your trees. I followed your trails as I left my own. I offer you my story, my land, and my growth. As I am wiped from São Luís, I too am reconstituted—carrying fresh knowledge and new life.
A Confluence of You and Me is a work born from reflections on the accepted notions we hold about land ownership, occupation, identity, and stewardship. It explores my own relationship to the land stewardship and monoculture my family has practiced, the land stewardship and monoculture I have encountered in Portugal, and my attempt to grow and care for a microorganism I barely know.
If we own land, are we entitled to determine its fate? If we choose to facilitate the introduction of life on that land, do we hold a responsibility to preserve or cull it? Do we have a responsibility to respect the life we encouraged? Does living on land shift our responsibility—and does the land, in turn, shift us?
“A Confluence of You and Me” is a composition in three parts:
Part 1
A cotton cloth tanned with black walnuts collected from a walnut grove in Union, Kentucky planted by hand through the labor of my grandparents and their parents, that same cloth dyed with eucalyptus bark collected from a eucalyptus grove in São Luís, Portugal associated with Cultivamos Cultura. Fine lines expand across the cloth, mapping imagery from an unknown fungus or bacteria I have cultivated, and photographed under a microscope. These lines have been painted using clays that have been ground and hydrated, one from the region of São Luís, and one from the mouth of the Mira River. These lines key to their three dimensional, living counterparts.
Part 2
Two petri dishes reside across from one another, one small, one large. Inside each, a scaled and 3D-printed rendering of the organism’s topography. Along its high ridges grows the very unknown organism that I seek to characterize in large format. At its valleys, rivulets of clay from Sao Luis inoculate the floor of the prints with unfamiliar microorganisms.
Part 3
Spanning the edge of the work, two bodies of clay lay before you: red from the hills of São Luís, blue from the Mira River’s mouth.
São Luís, Portugal July 2025