Plant Bowen, Euharlee, Georgia, 2017

I began examining the larger life cycle of coal electricity—the material sources and means of production, as well as how the electric plants are geographically situated within rural residential communities, which primarily burdens people of color and of economic disadvantage. From photographic documentation of the six largest coal-fired electric plants in the United States in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia, I made a series of easel-sized oil-on-linen paintings, incorporating the ash by-product as a material painted on the canvases as grounds, skies, and frames. While an artwork itself certainly cannot change the world, art practices and projects can and do work with larger social movements and struggles to glacially achieve change on a far greater scale than is capable with the efforts of any one artist acting alone as an individual. Ultimately, I am interested in the role the visuality of art as its own experience can take, as much as art’s potential for social change.