Thoughts on this exhibit:
We, humans, are known for disrupting habitats, not necessarily for the good of that habitat and usually for our own benefit.
Patterns and their repeats attract me, specifically in the form of wallpaper. I am always on the lookout for subject matter that will inspire a narrative pattern. I have been aware of dams and their negative ecological affect for a while, but it wasn’t until I heard the phrase “dam displacement” in Professor Hinkle’s Water Resources course that I felt compelled to make work about dams.
As you can see in my brainstorming materials, I was particularly drawn to the colors of algal blooms, the scales of the native fish and the growing aquatic roots. When creating the pattern, I went through various iterations of the design and finally settled on extracting the aerial watercolor/color pencil renderings of algal blooms and pairing them with pen drawings of fish and sprouting plants. While algae sucks the literal life out of our rivers (in the form of oxygen), plants and fish bring the life back into our rivers. I settled on combining the contrasting imagery of life-giving organisms and a life-depleting organism for my pattern and titled it “Life in Bloom: A Look at the Environmental Consequences of Dam Displacement.”
This exhibit was made possible by the Small Endowment.
Many thanks to Professor Beavers for her guidance and help with this project.