Deep Futures: Sites of Toxic Land Use  

How do Toxic Sites Hold Memory?

This work is an ongoing series of sculptures, video and text with raw glaze materials gathered from superfund sites, abandoned mining sites, and other sites of extractive land use throughout the United States.

Since 2018, I have been researching and visiting Superfund Sites and other sites of irreversible toxic extraction, to which I have a personal connection. 

This research and collection process stems from my familial experience of living in/on sites of toxic extraction. I grew up in a town that sits on top of an abandoned gold mine and its residual tailings laced with arsenic and mercury. My mother and grandmother grew up ON one of the nation’s largest Superfund Sites, also contaminated with lead, mercury, and arsenic. That site is downwind from another, very prominent nuclear Superfund Site, contaminated with Uranium, Plutonium, and other radioactive materials. 

Through this work, I ask...

What led to the creation of these sites? Are they still being created? How am I part of their creation? What worldviews led to the creation and unregulation of these sites? What can we learn from the past? Will the entire world eventually become an (undesignated) Superfund Site?

Sites researched so far: 

• Berkeley Pit, Butte, MT
• Bunker Hill Mine, Kellog, ID
• Chem Dyne, Hamilton, OH
  
• Del Amo/Montrose, Los Angeles, CA
  
• General Dynamics, Longwood, FL
  
• Hanford Nuclear Site, Kennewick, WA
• Lake Onondaga, Syracuse, NY
  
• Lava Cap Mine, Grass Valley, CA
• Oak Ridge Nuclear Site, Oak Ridge, TN
  
• Portland Harbor, Portland, OR