The Mammoth Project excavates the lost histories of a generation of Black men in the Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky. Their stories as the original guides through the deep cave system was little known to many and deeply troubling for me when I discovered it.
Fundamental to the Mammoth Project is exploring my own need to understand what I saw as underrepresentation of Black people within the larger narratives about environmentalism. Black people’s relationship with the natural world (and space in general) has always had to contend with the circumstances of white racist ideation, from lynching to red-lining in more recent years, there is a continued attempt to regulate our experiences in space.
Upon successfully growing fibers, I processed them and turned the pulp into sheets of paper. Using paper from the fibers I produced and processed, I printed silhouettes of some of these men onto them, literally transferring the object with a power that really linked a deep history of land with the ghost of present day remembering.
Mammoth 1, 2016
torchlight sunflower handmade paper, ink jet printed
21.5” x 30“
Mammoth 2, 2016
torchlight sunflower handmade paper, ink jet printed
21.5” x 30“
Matthew, 2016
hand grown handmade paper, ink jet print, collage