I know they say you reap what you sow, but I can’t change the world so we may as well watch the grass grow
People have a need for food, love, and a place to call home yet we built machines to conquer. Whether it is a machine that mines, a machine that kills, or a machine built to store information, humanities machines are built to harness, and capture the natural world that surrounds us for our advantage.
Driving across the vast West Texas landscape, across the great plains one sees pump jacks pumping back and forth.
I know they say you reap what you sow, but I can’t change the world, so we might as well watch the grass grow, I speak of how we carelessly pull nonrenewable resources from the earth despite our knowledge of the unsustainability of this process. Little to nothing has been done by us in the United States to change this process in favor of something more sustainable. To watch the world continue to roll around on these crude wheels of generations past is frustrating.
The infrastructure of this resource is fragile always moving from place to place. The oil industry leaves detritus and rusted old machines strewn across the vast landscape.
This is an abstraction of a pump jack materials of steel and aluminum are used to build this sculpture just as they are in the actual machine. I cut patterns of flowers and leaves, forged roses and branches are connected to this sculpture, not only to demonstrate that which we are taking from in our continued practice of mining for oil but to symbolize my female take on an industry that is historically thought of as male. In this, there is a rebellious feminine act, as it takes great labor to create with this ridged material something more organic. These materials are misbehaving; they are not acting like the ridged industrial material we have come to expect, and in that there is rebellion.
Materials:
16g steel, pencil rod, forged steel rod, cast aluminum, 2” square steel tubing, plastic-wrapped steel cable, paste wax,
2019