The Louisiana Coast maps study the relationship between New Orleans, Louisiana and the environment that fluctuates around her: the pressure exerted by the lake, the encroachment of the Gulf, the paper-thin, sensitive wetlands that separate the reinforced city from open water. In this environment, both destructive and constructive forces coexist; both within and without human control. These paintings explore those processes of coastal erosion and land-building on the Gulf Coast.

The paintings play with the rules of maps differently. Some forgo traditional map rules like scale, proportion and orientation. Distorted and expressive, they challenge their manmade representation like the physical process of coastal erosion challenges our manmade landscape. Those of land building function in the opposite way: conforming to the rules of scale and proportion, they explore human-constructed elements like levees, buffers, and terraces in hard-lined, controlled detail and relegate organic expression to the interior of these forms. In each, the paintings explore states that exist between control and chaos in a landscape indelibly altered by human hands and minds.

Delta: Alternate Futures

Southern Louisiana's long-term future rests on our community's ability to exist within a changing environment on a constantly fluctuating coastline. Our community has an incredible, moon-shot plan to work with the natural environment that protects our city and these paintings explore some of the projects within that plan.

25 Years

This painting is based on the Lower Breton Diversion land-building project in Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, designed to buffer communities from coastal erosion, sea level rise, and storm surge. Here, in deep, open water, computer models from the Engineer Research and Development Center USACE show sediment unfolding like a flower in a crevasse splay land formation. Delicate and deliberate, it would take a quarter of a century of perfect performance for the Lower Breton Diversion to create wetlands at this scale.

The painting recreates computer modeling results with haptic brushstrokes and coastal sediment, evoking a resilient living landscape. A paint-color scale roughly depicts displacement difference of land and water. Land created in the Lower Breton Diversion would be just under two meters at its highest point; a fragile, but indispensable protector of life on the Mississippi River Delta.

Kintsugi

Kintsugi depicts our city, its water, and the valuable flood protection system that guards urban life on the Louisiana delta.

The painting's is inspired by the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery in gold. To repair something in Kintsugi is to transform a broken object into something more valuable than the original, accepting and celebrating the breakage and repair as an important part of object's history. The painting shows a thin gold line between the city and sea.