2019. Found material, horse bone, handmade kenaf and kozo paper sculpture.
This horse head sculpture, half resembling a live head and half resembling a skull resting atop a driftwood-like pile, is crafted out of found materials and bones primarily from Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, NY. Handmade paper coats parts of the skull and netting to highlight the ways in which nature tries to make amends to the damage we’ve done–leaving a somewhat ghostly residue that shadows the objects’ past lives. The netting, while also reminiscent of coastal aesthetics, is a type of plastic often used by farmers to protect crops as an alternative method to unsustainable pesticides and herbicides, however, when it is disposed of, becomes a hazardous impenetrable object that obstructs the ocean and frequently kills marine wildlife.The legacy of human pollution and abuse of animal resources is one that continues to haunt our environments and are an inescapable reminder of our careless treatment of the earth. This is especially evident at the place of this project’s inspiration. The first use of this land associated with Dead Horse Bay was in the 1850s when horse rendering factories lined the coast– processing the horses (that lived to pull NYC’s carriages) into glue, fertilizers, and oils, and dumping their chopped up bones into the residing bay. The factories shut down in 1936, but the land continued to be used as one of the largest garbage dumps in New York City. These massive landfills were capped in 1953 due to the potential for overflow, but despite the efforts, the landfills burst anyways– an event that still continuously litters the beach with garbage and horse bones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This project, Equine Wake, takes pieces of those objects and bones from the bay as a structural skeleton, and is meant to serve as a haunting memorial to not only the land and body of water that have been desecrated, but the lives and deaths of the horses that were both so disrespected in favor of material consumption.