I completed a two week funded artists residency with the Volland Foundation, located in the tallgrass prairies of Flint Hills, Kansas. The rural area boasts clay and silt-rich soil streaked with exposed limestone outcroppings. During the residency, I worked in a former smithy, and honed rammed earth model techniques and ‘recipes’ using exposed subsoil visibly eroded along a creek on the property, limestone gravel on site, and sand from a quarry down the road.
Models tested combinatorial possibilities of cut limestone, plaster, earth, soldered copper, and 3d clay prints from a previous student project. The material studies alternately read as masonry blocks, as architectural models, and as scale monuments akin to land art installations.