With the abundance of mash-ups, fake news, and half-truths circulating, as a culture we can’t sort and evaluate the information we see fast enough to understand it. In response, I turned my research to archeological and archetypal symbols. History etched in stone is less mutable than its digital counterpart, though human behavior remains consistent. Throughout history we’ve seen the impervious systematic destruction of heritage by the power of ideological reasoning and self-serving political agendas. While the stories we have to guide us now are too tied to personal agenda to guide us, the ancestral truths and connective longevity foraged from our ancestors, the great migrations and the age of exploration, tell tales of life, death, love, friendship, war, peace, sex and freedom.

I have been examining the systematic destruction of culturally significant architecture and environments - attempts to destroy cultural heritage and the relationship to place therefore devastating familial history. My research has led me to the necessary protection of buildings and ecosystems during equally culpable historical periods of war or natural disasters and climate change. There is an opposition between scientific evidence and arrogant denial. The abstract use of sandbags function as a protection but also as a long-term symbolic representation of what they are protecting. Here, digitally printed wallpaper was made from photographing colorful variations of hand-dyed and sewn pink and orange canvas sandbags. They have the appearance of a theatrical backdrop behind a deep trench dug into the earth. An intentionally manufactured illusion between artifice and reality. I see these barriers having several functions depending on point of view: the wall serves as a physical environmental defense with a trench often used during martial operations; visitors can actively climb into the immersive trench including themselves within the protective barrier. Or, the colorful printed backdrop and hole create an out of place sense of imagined theatre. This project is on-going and to be created site specifically in other forms in outdoor environments and within interior spaces.

There is an interest in defining a period of our collective history and cultural understanding through objects of symbolic meaning used for ritual and cultural identity. While some objects have fetishistic qualities others are used for such reasons as fertility, worship or shamanistic idols. Exploring the vitality and power of primitive tribal art and the banal objects of pop culture are used to compress these apparently opposing elements into objects of meaning and humor.

Continuing themes developed in Sledgmhammer.Bullet.Bomb. this also focuses on how natural disasters and accidents are inevitable but it is human aggression where we experience the loss of art, architecture and historical sites that are neither designed nor intends to be destroyed. To deliberately eradicate identity is to eradicate art and objects of symbolic meaning. We have witnessed systematic destruction of heritage as an attempt to destroy cultural diversity through religious or ideological reasoning, political agenda, activism or cultural curation. I wanted to reimagine an object that is simultaneously a symbol and protectant. When building protective barricades for fortification in front of and around culturally significant objects, artifacts and architecture they then become the new identity and description for the object they are protecting. Through the use of common art making materials: paint, canvas, marble and wood, they are reinterpreted as devices to defend, deter or lessen destruction but also form a new autonomous work to be visited, viewed and contemplated.