AgriQuilt #1


Cotton

45” x 50”

2022


Temperate grasslands — what we know as the prairie — are the least protected landscape on Earth. Grasslands aren’t sublime like mountains; their consistency and vastness is much easier to destroy.

AgriQuilt #1, made while I was in residence at Art Farm in rural Nebraska, is a reflection of how so much of the Great Plains has been gridded into massive industrial farming blocks, each side a mile long. This system cannot be neatly demonized or defended: yes, it dries out the land and homogonizes the soil, but it is also foundational to our food supply. There is a strange but lonely beauty to this landscape. Satellite-operated farming equipment negates the need for visible human labor, and so the land seems always to be empty. But the cornfields shine a brilliant gold in the light of early morning. 

AgriQuilt #1 is part of an ongoing project that uses patchworking to explore land use.