Untitled (Oaxaca Project) (2022) began while participating in the Pocoapoco artist residency located in Oaxaca City. While in Oaxaca I engaged in a month-long inquiry into local natural art and craft materials, as well as the creative individuals and groups who work with them. I focused my research on the education practices, public engagement, extraction, and cultural properties associated with these materials by interviewing Oaxaca-based artists, teachers, and knowledge keepers. The project culminated in an installation featuring a display of materials and objects that I encountered in my journey, each contained within a plastic red bowl.

I collected the materials through exchanges between other artists and institutions or by foraging them from discarded waste. I sourced green cantera (local limestone) by picking up rubble from the crumbling colonial architecture around the city. I gathered yellow soil from a construction heap in Monte Albán, a Zapotec ruin. I collected red earth from rain runoff near the landscaped site of Santo Domingo church in the heart of the city.

The final collection was put on view in an installation at the Pocoapoco resident open house in September, 2022. The materials were presented in red synthetic vessels (in color contrast to the organic origins of their contents) and were each labeled with the name of the material and the information about where they were found and how they were obtained. Each vessel was laid out in a grid with the corresponding labels placed next to them. In addition to this display, I made watercolor paints from the pigments included in the collection and invited visitors to create their own artwork with them. The installation included a painting on paper which incorporated all the pigments I had gathered, as well as a display of several ceramic objects either obtained or created by myself.