Deep Futures
2025-Ongoing
Sculptures, photographs, video, and text paired with glazes developed using collected raw materials.
Exhibited:
2025- Fitton Center For Creative Arts, Hamilton, OH (solo show)
2026- UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL (solo show)
2026- Blowing Rock Museum of Art (group show)
Since 2018, Amanda Leigh Evans has been collecting raw materials (photos, rocks, soils, pressings, and archival images) from Superfund sites she visits throughout the United States. A Superfund site is designated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a polluted location that requires long-term cleanup of hazardous material contamination, and their collection is made with the utmost caution.
Approximately 78 million people (roughly 24% of the U.S. population) live within 3 miles of a Superfund site, yet many are unaware of the dangers these sites pose. Invisible threats to human and ecological health are often not visually apparent when walking or driving past these sites. To live in the 21st Century is to reckon with our proximity and complicity with the ongoing creation of these sites.
Evans’ exhibition features ceramic sculpture, collected raw materials, large-format collage images, and research materials from several Superfund sites she has visited over the years. The project began when the artist discovered that her maternal family, which has chronic and neurological health issues, was raised on the Bunker Hill Mine Superfund Site in Northern Idaho, one of the nation’s largest and most complex Superfund sites in the United States.
This research and collection process stems from Evans’ familial experience of living in/on sites of toxic extraction. Evans grew up in a town that sits on top of an abandoned gold mine in Northern California, with residual tailings laced with arsenic and mercury. Her mother and grandmother grew up in Northern Idaho on one of the nation’s largest Superfund Sites, a former silver mine contaminated with lead, mercury, and arsenic. That site overlaps with the Hanford Nuclear Site, perhaps the most famous Superfund Site, known for its contamination of Uranium, Plutonium, and other radioactive materials resulting from the production of the atomic bomb.
Approximately 78 million people (roughly 24% of the U.S. population) live within 3 miles of a Superfund site, yet many are unaware of the dangers these sites pose. Invisible threats to human and ecological health are often not visually apparent when walking or driving past these sites. To live in the 21st Century is to reckon with our proximity and complicity with the ongoing creation of these sites.
Evans’ exhibition features ceramic sculpture, collected raw materials, large-format collage images, and research materials from several Superfund sites she has visited over the years. The project began when the artist discovered that her maternal family, which has chronic and neurological health issues, was raised on the Bunker Hill Mine Superfund Site in Northern Idaho, one of the nation’s largest and most complex Superfund sites in the United States.
This research and collection process stems from Evans’ familial experience of living in/on sites of toxic extraction. Evans grew up in a town that sits on top of an abandoned gold mine in Northern California, with residual tailings laced with arsenic and mercury. Her mother and grandmother grew up in Northern Idaho on one of the nation’s largest Superfund Sites, a former silver mine contaminated with lead, mercury, and arsenic. That site overlaps with the Hanford Nuclear Site, perhaps the most famous Superfund Site, known for its contamination of Uranium, Plutonium, and other radioactive materials resulting from the production of the atomic bomb.
To date, sites features include:
A growing archive...
As this exhibition travels, sites near exhibition locations are added to the archive. For example, when this work was shown at the University of Central Florida, City Industries in Witner Park, FL was added to the archive. If your institution would like to host an exhibition of this work, I would gladly engage with oral history archives, students or a general public in researching a Superfund Site near you, with the intention of adding it to this collection.
- Berkeley Pit, Butte, MT
- Bunker Hill Mine, Kellogg, 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
- City Industries, Witner Park, FL
- Barber Orchard, Waynesville, NC
A growing archive...
As this exhibition travels, sites near exhibition locations are added to the archive. For example, when this work was shown at the University of Central Florida, City Industries in Witner Park, FL was added to the archive. If your institution would like to host an exhibition of this work, I would gladly engage with oral history archives, students or a general public in researching a Superfund Site near you, with the intention of adding it to this collection.
