Shipwreck
Fall 2022

It's 5 pm, almost October, and 87 degrees, with 10% humidity. I live with severe drought in Northern New Mexico. Abiquiu Lake, the nearby reservoir, is at 30% capacity.   

The canoe I built in my Red Hook Brooklyn apartment during COVID sits atop a pile of sand and tumbleweed, looking like a cross between a shipwreck or a derelict encampment. Fabric is wrapped around the boat, building materials, and weeds, some flapping in the wind.  

I am alone, having resigned from my professorship to move west. I live in the vast high desert, surrounded by mountains, umbrellaed by the Milky Way. 

I had lived on the water  or in NYC for most of my life. Moving to a rural desert town of 150 upended all my points of reference—the material, emotional, social, and sensory. The feeling can be of awful separation, anxiety,  sometimes panic, commensurate with a total breakdown of the familiar east coast. On other days it’s euphoria and the sensation of being at one with the universe. I am feeling shipwrecked.

I explore  “shipwrecked," both metaphorically and literally. Utilizing boat building, printmaking, drawing, cyanotypes and textiles I  investigate the psychological elements of being marooned and the transformation of connections to water and land, including blurring familiar spatial boundaries.”

I completed this work at my one year anniversary of moving to NM, Sept 15, 2022