DUMP

Sealed and surfacing
dispersed and drifting

Walking at Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, I began to notice objects emerging from the soil — decorated porcelain fragments, colored glass shards, rusted pipes, bones, the residue of mid-century domestic life pressing upward through clay and earth. The park sits atop a 90-acre landfill that the city of Berkeley operated from the mid-1950s until 1983, when it was capped with soil and clay and converted into open space. The garbage was sealed beneath the surface, made invisible, the problem of disposal resolved by concealment.

But the land refuses this arrangement. Ground squirrels and other rodents excavate into the soil, and the buried objects follow their tunnels upward. Seasonal movement does the rest. What was sealed is surfacing.

When I discovered a map revealing the landfill's organized waste zones — concrete debris, household trash, foundry waste — my walks through the park changed. I began documenting where each object emerges across the site, building a picture of what was buried where, and what the land is choosing to return. These objects are ambassadors from a specific historical moment, the full flowering of American disposable culture, randomly selected by animal behavior and geological pressure and delivered to the surface without curatorial intent.

To make these works I place the objects directly onto cyanotype-coated paper and expose them to light. There is no camera, no negative, no translation. The object makes its own impression. This directness feels essential — the work is about what cannot be hidden indefinitely, and the process refuses to interpose anything between the thing and its image.

From this origin the work expanded into the broader Bay Area landscape, following garbage that moves differently — windblown, roadside, dispersed across the terrain without burial or concealment. If the Cesar Chavez material is sealed and surfacing, this is dispersed and drifting — waste in open circulation rather than compressed archive.

Cyanotype prints
Arches Aquarelle 140 lb
Square prints 22” x 22”
Horizontal prints 22” x 15”