“Listen or your tongue will make you deaf”
as translated by The Cherokee Nation, 2024, 60” x 96” x 4” Cast ceramic, resin and mixed media
My sculptural mural uses the controversial 2020 US census as the departure point. Each form is colored to identify the racial data collected. Creating 206 parts over 2 years, I proportioned the census data to visually show who we are as a nation: 57.8% White, 18.9% Hispanics, 12.4% Blacks, 6.3% Asians and 2% Native and Islander Nations. 5% are mixed race people. I have taken license to exaggerate some colors to capture an essence of race or personal orientation - and omitted others to reflect those who were left out of the census altogether. Each of the mural parts are unique and one-of-a-kind but made from the same source.
The Quadrants
I got my degree in ceramics motivated to work using the earth itself. My early years in the 1990’s were consumed with wall murals looking at the earth from an aerial view. This language came back to me in 2018 preparing for a solo show in Denver. Observations of the way humans survey the actual landscape has always mystified me. Pure squares and oblique angles that have absolutely nothing to do with the contours of real areas on the ground, became a theme to incorporate in these new quadrant map forms. Using physical rocks as an allusion to mountain shapes, colored glossy resins for water issues of the west, monopoly scaled houses to suggest residences and textured topographical surfaces with etched in roads and rivers all added to the multiple bright glazes, capturing the differences between environments in a fantastical way.