Copper Nail and the Swallow
A copper nail driven into a living tree releases toxins that interrupt its growth, eventually killing it. As the tree dies, the ecosystem it supports—birds, insects, and other forms of life—is displaced. The swallow, no longer able to inhabit the tree, relocates to human structures, nesting along roofs and edges where architecture begins to replace ecology. The work positions this shift as both a condition of survival and a marker of increasing distance between natural and constructed environments.
Working across stone, metal, asphalt, and paint, the installation brings together materials tied to systems of extraction, infrastructure, and circulation. Copper, oil, and asphalt—fundamental to modern industry—are reconfigured into unstable relationships, where natural and industrial forms become indistinguishable.
A tree constructed from stacked disc rotors rises as a mechanical surrogate. Stones sourced from Arizona and Saudi Arabia—sites of copper and oil production—are split and held in tension by a single copper nail. Asphalt appears both as ground and as a false geology, shifting between natural and fabricated states.
In the background, a large-scale painting references the coffered ceiling of the Pantheon and its reinterpretation in the Washington, D.C. Metro, linking ancient and modern infrastructures of power, movement, and control. The installation’s dimensions mirror those of the artist’s studio at the time of its making, situating the work within the conditions of its own production.
Across the installation, materials carry conflicting roles—supporting life, enabling progress, and producing destruction. The work forms a system in which these forces collapse into one another, revealing a growing separation between human activity and the environments that sustain it.
The installation operates as a closed system, determined by the spatial and material conditions of its making. Rather than representing an external landscape, the work reconstructs a field in which extracted and industrial materials are forced into proximity, producing relationships that remain unstable and unresolved. Scale is not symbolic but contingent—emerging from the dimensions of the studio and the limits of handling, transport, and assembly. Within this framework, materials are not illustrative but structural, each carrying histories of use, circulation, and transformation that continue to act within the work.