Living History

2022, 108” x 186” x 114”, glass, wood, metal, gypsum, bulky epoxy, paint, cold fusion, permanent collection: Wichita Art Museum, photo credit: Nohra Haime

Living History is a large-scale site-specific sculpture that explores the dual concepts of deep maps and deep time to examine a sense of place. It investigates the anthropogenic impact on the natural world and the tenacity of biota over time, specific to Wichita. Deep maps is a construct that uses different methods to understand a location and was coined by William Least Heat-Moon in PrairyErth: A Deep Map, a book about Kansas’s tall grass prairie. Deep time is a term that refers to geologic time that was originated by John McPhee in Basin and Range.

Living History combines sculpted tall grass prairie flora and rock formations with objects that reference Wichita Art Museum’s permanent collection, familiar domestic objects and manual tools used in regional vocations such as agriculture and drilling, all sculpted in glass, ceramic, and painted wood. Monumental columnar forms, referring to the museum’s barber pole collection, jut above and dance through compositions of cultural detritus; they bore through the median plane and are revealed below.

Common prairie grasses pierce the surface of the table and interrupt the compositions as long root structures trail beneath.The depiction of rock formations and flora in Living History anchors the composition in the natural world and contextualizes the objects as symbols of the age of the Anthropocene. The landscape refers to strata found at the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve; the last remaining uncultivated remnant of prairie that once covered over 140 million acres of North America.

photo credit: Larry Schwarm

photo credit: Larry Schwarm