An archaeology of the present

This ongoing body of work and research treats the present as an archaeological field, following materials across deep-time, exploring their origins, extractions, transformations, uses, and afterlives. It asks how past geologic processes have become subject to human interventions in the present, and how actions today may shape what persists in the future.

Each line of inquiry finds its own form. Installation, text, archive, and socially-engaged work is guided by field collection, archival tracing, and material experimentation. The aim of the work is to connect geologic histories with lived time, clarifying how material pasts inform material futures.

This work is grounded in my lifelong engagement with earth materials and inspired by my work with Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation during my graduate studies, which offered a model for reading and interpreting sites. It is further informed by Robert Smithson’s writing on entropy and time, Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, and Glenn Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia—the distress experienced when environmental change transforms the place one inhabits.