To Be On/In/An Edge, 2021

3 hours (1 month installation), presented at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, WA, September 2021

Materials: dead ends, hanes cotton shirt, skirt, silt, estuary water, sedge seedlings, door frames, clear plastic, nails.

Our feet would make tides, still make tides. I brought you the sea but it dies in here. Soft silt or plastic-coated concrete. Sedge or hair. Wet sets in. Aerate gently.

A reparative self-dredging, and the nurturing, maternal potential of “in-between” spaces through the lens of estuarine restoration. Connecting to the show’s broader theme of homesickness, low-tide areas are examined as places of inherent nostalgia - shaped by the absence of water, and home to both decay and new life. My own conflicting familial relationships to the environment (memories of low-tide walks with my grandmother, my grandfather’s experience working on a Mississippi dredging boat) are filtered through these estuary spaces, first by an in situ activation, then by recreation in the white-walled gallery. In doing so, I enact a personal reparation and restoration with the water’s edge.