60" x 60" x 14"

This artwork encapsulates every study I made while teaching the ancestral craft of rush mat weaving to myself while in residence on the west coast of Ireland. Made from locally scavenged material, the aesthetically wonky, unusable, and willfully amateur qualities of this object establish a diasporic lens through which to consider the fact that more and more migration stories are written by policies that intensified the climate crisis. Material and method unite in meditation on the ways in which extractive industries and global capital are instrumental in the dissolution of tradition and alienation of labor. Inspired by the 1968 student protest slogan “Beneath the paving stones, the beach,” the mat is arranged in symbiotic relationship with a stack of locally mined paving stones 350 million years in the making, recalling the Irish practice of dry-stone wall building as well as the touristic practice of cairn-building. At once ocean, island, new landmass, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and Pangea, this piece recognizes that human activity is irreversibly entangled in a new conceptualization of nature, while also presenting a call to action towards an Earth-centered shift that asks the viewer to consider their own power to act in the face of capitalism’s slow violence.