The near total eradication of the native prairie in Minnesota has spared remnants only in a disparate patchwork of areas either too difficult to farm, designated as parkland, or protected by their proximity to railways and roads. I was particularly interested in the remnants preserved by railroads. Given the role of railroads in the history of the American frontier, I was intrigued by the fact that the very infrastructure which led to the development of agriculture and subsequent destruction of the prairie was now its inadvertent protector. Among the first of western geometric impositions on an organic landscape, the railroads which helped impose the grid on the Midwest reveal and protect the pockets of the landscape they fundamentally altered.
During the fall trimester, I spent time interacting with two railroad prairie remnants near Carleton. I returned to the sites as the seasons progressed and maintenance on one railroad went underway, witnessing a brief window of the sites’ long history of transformation. In comparison with prairie preservation and restoration efforts such as the arb, these sites are in some ways more natural than efforts that seek to remove human influence, and it is this unintentional relationship that I seek to explore in my sculptures, made entirely out of found objects from the two sites.
I want to question the duality of industrial and organic, human and natural, linear and spatial, highlighting the qualities of the spaces where these opposing forces meet. I hope to raise awareness about these neglected landscapes and bring viewers to question what they can reveal about our attitudes toward development, conservation, and what it means for a place to be natural in a landscape shaped by human influence. My sculptures and drawings explore the qualities of line, both natural and man-made, as marks on and of the land we occupy.
