Works

I began Maddin Creek with an urge to make a deconstructed cave painting. I wanted to parody the idea of a “deconstructed salad,” but with an anthropological phenomenon thousands of years old. I personally found each rock in the piece at Haunted Ridge in Washington County, Missouri. These stones are drusy quartz with agate banding. They absolutely litter the area but cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Nearby Haunted Ridge is the Maddin Creek Site, a paleolithic rock art site with carvings nearly one thousand years old. I lifted a glyph from one of those rocks and copied it onto the calf skin—the quintessential cave art subject—in a shade of yellow stringent enough to scare the original carver to death. The rocks—usually the substrate of Paleolithic art—now help pull the calf skin taught for the mysterious glyph to be painted on.
 

Everyone is encouraged to touch and feel Maddin Creek (respectfully)! Investigate the quartz rocks with your phone flashlight. We should be able to touch art more often... (20% of proceeds will go to a local First Nation charity. Contact for more info)

This is a sculpture based on the radioactive contamination of Coldwater Creek in St. Louis. A large amount of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project was dumped next to this creek, and over the years, more than 6,000 cases of cancer have been reported along its banks. (disproportionately impacting black people)

 

The clay here is made directly from the radioactive dirt from the riverbank. The nuclear clay (contaminated with uranium, thorium, and plutonium) is then stuck with 6,000 capillary blood collection tubes, with each tube holding a small sample of contaminated water from different places along the river. 

 

Scientists from WashU (my school) were directly involved with the manufacturing of the uranium in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People are still dying (both here in St. Louis and around the world) from America’s atomic legacy.