Deep Futures
2025
Sculptures, photographs, video, and text paired with glazes developed using collected raw materials.
Exhibited:
2025- Fitton Center For Creative Arts, Hamilton, OH
2026- UCF Art Gallery, Orlando, FL
2026- Blowing Rock Museum of Art
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.
Evan’s 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.
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.
Evan’s 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 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.
Sites included:
Sites included:
- 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
