#marsh ruins

[altrbody]

Megan Cope, RE FORMATION 2016-19 / Cast-concrete oyster shells, copper slag / 12,000+ pieces: installed dimensions variable.

The word ‘midden’ means simply ‘refuse pile’, but these shell mounds – which have been found in coastal regions all over the world – should really be understood as material archives, which always marked sites of social and ceremonial gathering. Working within the context of Australia's settler colonial history, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope has emphasised the significance of Aboriginal middens as architectural structures. She creates sculptural installations with thousands of cast-concrete oyster shells in meticulously arranged mounds, evoking the ancient middens that were desecrated for use in concrete production. Some of these installations have also deployed copper slag – a glittery black sand that arises as a by-product of industrial copper extraction – pointing to the continuing destruction of sacred Aboriginal sites through contemporary mining practices in Australia.

-Amelia Groom, Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins

[altrbody]

Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins at dusk.

[altrbody]

Beverly Buchanan, Marsh Ruins submerged in water, 1981. Beverly Buchanan papers, Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution.

Mounds of concrete are covered in a protective layer of ‘tabby’, a mixture of lime, sand, oyster shells, water and ash traditionally used by African Americans throughout the American South to construct shelters and grave stones. Acknowledging the vulnerability that is intrinsic to the earth, nature, and our bodies, these mounds were always intended to be lost to erosion. Buchanan was interested in the continual process of ruination – of culture, landscape, traditions and things – that harnessed the transformative powers of destruction. She embraced the idea that her mounds would live on in other forms, morphed by the ebb and flow of time, the tide, and human history. Unlike most memorials that speak of conviction, longevity, permanence (lest we forget), Marsh Ruins is an ode to ephemerality, vulnerability, and ghostly, immaterial, love.