A Present Absence (2024-ongoing)
This project is supported in part by ArtSpark, Acadiana Center for the Arts’ Individual Artist grant program, generously funded by the Lafayette Economic Development Authority and National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for this project came from the Acadiana Native Plant Project.
The outcome of the project was the creation of a site specific installation, "A Present Absence," at the Atelier de La Nature (Arnaudville, LA), comprised of a pollinator garden with 12 individual sculptures.
This project was assisted by biologist
Kimberly Hamm, who provided guidance on plant selection, garden maintenance, and supplied bee specimens that were cast in metal and incorporated into the flower sculptures.
The goals included learning about native plants and considering the role of habitat in relationship to maintaining biodiversity of bee species, and creating a sculptural installation that would serve as both a site for that experience and provide an actual beneficial site for these native bees. This project will continue to serve that need, and the aspiration is for this work to encourage closer looking through the relationship of scale of the cast components in the larger landscape. This project became an opportunity to collaborate with a scientist, learn more about the local ecology, and create a site specific living work, which is a new experience for my practice.
