LAND
MEMORY COMMISSIONS
land memory paintings are made with earth from a place that holds special meaning for you
they are a way to commemorate new beginnings, hold onto the past, communicate attachment and love, or process change and grief
This is a very personalized process. We'll work together to gather handfuls of soil, clay, or rocks from the place you'd like to commemorate.
I'll grind and distill the earth into fine-art pigments, create a palette to compliment the natural colors, and then use that to create your piece.
"In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was—as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark. Sometimes I find myself at the mouth of the road—the red dust so fine the wind lifts it like a scarf, and I walk down toward the house, past what were the fields of tobacco, the shrunken pasture...
I know I will find my bed still made, and Sister's and my brothers', their portraits staring from gilt-framed soot and glass as though through the fog that is time. There is no one left to know the life that happened here and say their names out loud.
I have come home for this."
- Claudia Emerson, Pinion: An Elegy
LAND MEMORY COMMISSIONS (selected)
2022
Private Commission, land memory painting in collaboration with artists Bo Bartlett, Betsy
Eby, and Virginia Candler, Wheaton Island, ME
Private Commission, land memory painting in collaboration with two families who occupied
one plot of land in separate decades, Hattiesburg, MS
Private Commission, 4 land memory paintings for family members using earth pigments from their
generational homes in Buffalo, NY and Ireland.
2021
Private Commission, land memory painting (72”x72”) made from southern Louisiana clays and shotgun house colors in collaboration with an first-time home buyer, New Orleans, LA
2020
Private Commission, land memory painting made from deconstructed clam shells in
collaboration with the artist’s father, Matunuck Beach, RI
Private Commission, land memory painting in collaboration with two long-distance friends
who once lived in the same place, Hanover, NH
Private Commission, Louisiana earth pigment painting (48”x60”) made from the banks of
the Mississippi River, Algiers Point, LA
