Mud Maps, 2014

The Mud Map paintings are made with mud pigment collected along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay in Richmond, CA, and based on imagery of debris and flotsam photographed in the same area. Their form references the mandala—a Buddhist symbol of the cosmos and life cycle that offers an ordering logic in a seemingly chaotic world. The Mud Maps self-consciously explore my very human tendency to seek meaning, pattern and narrative in disorderly surroundings and experiences. As the Enlightenment conception of an orderly, harmonious, fully knowable ‘nature,’ distinct from the human, unravels, and as I fumble for a new ethic of environmental conduct, this impulse has grown stronger but also less tenable.

The Richmond Bay shoreline is comprised of a deeply entangled matrix of human generated-trash, and plant-, animal- and mineral-generated materials. Official signage designates the area both as a “natural resource protection area” with its rich ecosystem, and as a “hazardous materials area” due to past industrial and chemical waste dumping, and mercury deposits from the gold mining era. The mud contains organic matter from decomposing plants, animals, and rocks, supporting a thriving diversity of species; it also contains waste from dumping, historical gold mining, and local industry, including mercury, copper, nickel, pesticides, PCBs, dioxins, cyanide, selenium and a stew of pharmaceuticals. The mud is a both and—both a foundation for a rich habitat, and a toxic testament to the bay’s human history. In this work, the mud performs as a literal matrix of the area’s histories, and metaphorically as mythic prime material—its malleability latent with infinite futures.