Hybrid Zones

In 2021, together with a colleague, I started investigating the anthracite region in Eastern Pennsylvania, a place with a tremendously layered, complex and damaged history. I’m very interested in setting up associations to open up new ways of seeing materials and the landscapes that are connected with them, as a way to re-draw a future that is less ecologically and socially exploitative than it is now. The Puffin grant was instrumental in developing and producing a series of large scale graphite drawings for an exhibition in 2025 at the HUB – Robeson Gallery at Penn State University, and for making an artist’s publication that includes research on the background of the mining region and its many temporal layers. The publication is called Overburden – the term for the material discarded after the ore is removed, and which serves as a metaphor for the many fascinating and often overlooked aspects of these damaged landscapes. In it artworks, archival images of old mine shafts, photographs of mining landscapes, slag heaps, fossils, truck tires, and anthracite are brought together in a horizontal fold-out, that allows viewers to combine the many pages in different formations, mirroring the sometimes dizzying complexity of the region. It will be presented, along with a series of large scale drawings with graphite on crumpled paper, at HUB-Robeson Gallery in November 2025.