The Making of Broken
Using Ceramics to Tell the Story of Endangered Birds
Drawing and research about endangered birds is the cornerstone of my environmental art practice. I created my first portfolio at an artist residency in 2016 at La Porte Peinte Centre Pour les Arts in the tiny medieval village of Noyers-sur-Serein, France, about four hours south east of Paris.
Usually these drawings are used to create the silk screen designs that you can see on my recycled plastic feathers. However, I also use them to create plates.
Broken, my first floor installation, had its debut at my solo show Turbulence: Birds, Beauty, Language & Loss at the Centro Cultural Antigua Presidencia, Chapala, Mexico. Thanks to encouragement from my curator, Sergio Unzueta, this art exhibition gave me the opportunity to create Broken, which was created from smashing 40 ceramic plates and piling them up with building debris in the center of the gallery. The plates had hand painted images of my endangered bird drawings, which you could see on the shards.
Three months earlier, I put in an order for plates at Cerámica El Palomar, a family-owned ceramics factory in nearby Tlaquepaque, a pueblo known for its traditional Mexican handmade crafts. I was assigned to an artist named Patti, who hand painted each of the four plate designs that I created for Broken, my floor installation. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I planned to break most of the order.
When the plates were delivered to the gallery, Pagina, a local newspaper, videoed me smashing the plates on the sidewalk in front of the gallery in downtown Chapala in preparation for building Broken.
It’s easy to find building debris in Mexico and several bags were delivered to the gallery.
The concept behind the Broken installation was inspired by archeology. Archeologists use fragments of pottery and textiles to reconstruct stories about lost civilizations. By using ceramic fragments mixed with building debris in the Broken installation, I hoped to replicate the information about endangered birds as a warning that unless we act on their behalf, they will disappear and only leave their traces behind.
Three years later, in November 2021, I was offered another solo exhibition at PRPG.mx, a gallery in the Juarez District of Mexico City. This show titled Plumas, also offered an opportunity to build a new iteration of Broken. Once again, I mixed the broken plates with debris and built this second Broken floor installation in the corner of the gallery. You can see some time lapse videos documenting the construction of the second version of Broken and all the people involved with building the installation.
In 2022 while I was preparing for Avianto, a 3-gallery solo exhibition at the Train Station Museum in Chapala, Mexico, I decided to use the leftover ceramic scraps from the Broken floor installation to build a round mosaic sculpture, titled Broken Vessel. This vessel was completely covered with the ceramic shards from the original Broken installation. The Broken Vessel sculpture (which weighs a ton!) now graces my garden.
It’s exciting for me to express my ideas through different media and I look forward to creating yet another floor installation of Broken in a future show of my environmental artwork
