Pipelandia
Metal, sugarcane, plastic, lime, recycled paint, living plants, soil, paper made from sugarcane combined with shredded disposable plastic waste (“plasticane”), iron oak gall ink, ink made from sheetrock
68” x 30” x 30”
2022
Louisiana, land and water and all the swampiness in between, is riddled with pipelines, some functioning, many abandoned and defunct. The construction of these pipelines often exacerbates the issues of precarity our landscape faces, yet many new ones are still being proposed (and constructed). This sculpture imagines a future time when former pipelines may be the only thing holding together land, and the ecosystems that might thrive in the accretion of our cultural detritus after we’ve failed to recognize our shortsightedness and change course.
In this sculpture, the “plasticane” paper, made from sugarcane and plastic, is shaped over a welded structure embedded into a planter also made from sugarcane and plastic. Pipelines that alternate between metal and paper weave into fantastical configurations in and out of the planter form, and living plants grow around and over these structures, referencing how enmeshed this oil infrastructure is with our landscape and how complicated but necessary the issue of divestment and shifting to other forms of energy is. As Southern Louisiana sinks and sea-levels rise, this sculpture imagines what our entangled biomes might look like down the line if the status quo goes unchanged.