Unstable Landscapes: 11 Tidal Castings from the Ware River VA

11 castings with custom-made brackets and hardware for hanging, angled from the wall at a range of recommended slope angles for intertidal shoreline erosion control in the Chesapeake Bay

Silk, acrylic gel medium, oil paint, site-sourced plant-based ink, graphite, powder-coated steel

These castings record one hour in summer 2022 in the intertidal zone on the shore of the Ware River at coordinates 37.399960, -76.489639. At low tide, on top of a plastic tarp, I pressed raw-edged silk fabric into the folds of the sand exposed to air. I temporarily preserved this microtopography by coating the fabric in-situ with acrylic gel medium, a plastic material that will over time flake off at the edges. The woven textile echoes our entanglement with intertidal communities and implication in the threats facing them; and the plastic coating our attempts to preserve landscapes, the plasticity of ecosystems as they develop and respond to human interventions, and a barrier to full understanding that remains despite scientific study and embodied experience of a place.

The castings are angled from the wall at a range of recommended slope angles for intertidal shoreline erosion control in the Chesapeake Bay. Images of eelgrass (Zostera marina) reflect an unusually successful restoration project of the “underwater prairie” undertaken by Virginia Institute for Marine Studies in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Tidal Castings are part of a larger body of work, Unstable Landscapes, which experiments with deliberately non-archival processes and materials to examine unstable landscapes in the intertidal region around Gloucester VA, including sea level rise, ghost forests and other post-human impacts.

Brackets designed by Erica Rawson, and fabricated by Erica Rawson, Walter Ware, and Metta Ware. Photos in the gallery below by Anthony Camera:

Thank you Arts on Main in Gloucester VA for this artist residency, a solo exhibition, and the opportunity to share my plant-based dye methods in a community workshop. Additional thanks to Rob Atkinson of Christopher Newport University for the chance to share this and other art-science research at the Fear to Hope Restoration Ecology Symposium. See images of these events, Gloucester’s Plein Air Painting Festival, progress images of the work, and more from the residency below: