Flat Creek
In January 2017, I traveled to the Texas Hill Country for a one week self-guided artist residency. The purpose of the residency was to get outside of my normal setting to focus on creating new work inspired by the Texas Hill Country landscape. I feel a strong emotional pull towards the Hill Country. It has a mix of geologic features that are similar to my native Florida landscape- karst, springs, sinkhole pools- but the climate is very different. It is dry, sometimes windy, and the sun seems to bleach everything into a paler version of itself. The plants are a wonderland of strongly-scented Cedar groves mixed with chalky limestone soil and giant Agaves. On north facing limestone cliffs where water spills from springs, you can find pockets of southern maidenhair ferns dripping with springwater. It is this setting, this harsh environment with wonderous pockets of niche plant communities that I am drawn to. During my stay I learned even more about the experience of the Hill Country and explored the landscape on foot everyday. This page shows documentation from my temporary land art installations created in the Cedar Groves around the Cabin.
site markings with dyed fabric
I created work for landscape installations by first dyeing fabric yardage with my pre-mixed custom dye colors. I experimented with installing the dyed fabric in the Cedar Groves around the cabin. The cedar groves are dense and have a particular sap-cedar smell. I was drawn to the strewn Cedar trunks that are left behind from decomposed Cedar trees that have fallen and breaks in the groves where there are openings between clumps of Cedar. I identified three distinct types of spaces in the Cedar Grove landscape: 1) interior where the groves are thick with shade, 2)edges that are narrow openings between the groves, and 3) larger openings in full sun. For each type, I experimented with marking the ground in ways that heighten the spatial experience of the Grove.