TERRESTRIAL DEBRIS
In the iterations of this ongoing project, I enact practices of vigilant mourning.
Terrestrial Debris is a project that began in 2021. Originally, I proposed a project called "Drawn by Fire" to the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC Santa Barbara, which approached "vigilant mourning" through the iteration of the form of the urn. That proposal was declined, but I was offered the following constructive feedback:
While the committee appreciated the creative approach to mourning rituals, it found lacking a more thorough and sophisticated exploration of and engagement with the relationship between individual (artist) and collective (community) grief and loss. The committee also wanted to see more engagement with the local campus community (which also hosts ceramic practices), as well as with what forms of mourning and grief (concepts that require differentiation) are already happening in our communities, in this current moment of expansive, pervasive individual and collective loss.
In 2023 I reapplied with a proposal that had built on a development of the project focused on the loss of animal life from vehicular impact, also known as roadkill. I wrote, "As a microcosm of larger issues of multispecies entanglements and ecological loss and grief, this research-based creative project will culminate in an installation of ceramic bodies sourced from local clay deposits to represent the loss of life and offer visibility to that which had been rendered invisible."
Before I could complete this award, I was diagnosed with and began treatment for a recurrance of breast cancer that I had been originally diagnosed with in 2021. I was unable to bring the project to the installation phase, but I did utilize the award for research and development, which has evolved into various strands that continue to unfold.
I have identified the following strands:
I am beginning this Research Catlogue exposition on 2 June 2025. I intend to use it as a repository and explication to formalize and present my work, as currently these strands are living as writing and material in numerous formats and modes across a variety of platforms and mediums. While this has bothered me intensely over what are now years, I have begun to resolve this and use it instead as a foundational focus of my artisitic resarch in the develpment of my PhD in creative practice with Transart Institute and Liverpool John Moores University. I extend the suggestion, supported by a plentiful cadre of researchers and artists, that creative practice and artistic research explore areas, methods, and modes of practice that are often (and necessarily) unruly, messy, circuitous, recursive, and beyond human concsiouness and temporality. As Lucy Cotter writes in the introduction, "Artistic Resarch in a World on Fire," to her revised publication of essays in the compilation Reclaiming Artistic Research (2nd e.):
Instead of building on what is tangible, artistic research can pivot toward paying attention to human absences. It is attunded to gaps and strains in knowledge, rather than only what is evidently there...It is often through gathering fragmented, dispersed, invisible, unarchived cultural memory, and seeing the resemblances between forcibly separated materials and areas of thinking that a community or a culture can imagine forward. In grasping continuities across locations and temporalities, they can "move forward - both internally and externally."7 ...Artists bring the imaginative force and the associative, combinatory thinking of art making to bear on these materials, leading to potentially unforeseen outcomes." (16-17)
I look forward to utilizing this platform as I move through the iteration of my PhD development and the continuation of these strands of Terrestrial Debris to make my creative practice and research visible, to share with the community of practitioners and researchers that are supporting, informing, and inspiring my work.
