Line as Site and Material

This paper recounts my artistic practice over the last three years. I will describe the places, artists, artworks, and processes that have been meaningful to me in this time as I pursued my MFA and worked to understand my relationship to the living world. In the thesis Line as Site and Material, I respond to materiality and site through installation, sculpture, drawing, and video. I work with clay harvested from my hometown of El Paso, TX to connect to the personal histories of the borderlands and geological time. In the Second River Series, I walk in the empty riverbed of the Rio Grande to look for in-between space and document with video. Sculptures, drawings, and photography explore Portal or Void concepts. Time Study drawings scratched into the clay painted surfaces project light and shadows, changing shape and size with the rotational shift of the earth around the sun. With sensitivity to light, material, and site, I pay attention to nature in relation to how I see myself connected to place. My work hinges on the transformation of material and the healing realization that the human-nature relationship is not singular