Midden

Midden takes its title from the archaeological term for a mound of discarded shells and domestic refuse—an accumulation of ordinary life that, over time, becomes evidence of human presence. Once considered waste, middens preserve the traces of labor, ritual, sustenance, and community. They remind us that history is rarely monumental; it is built slowly from what is left behind.

I wanted the figure in this piece to be both buoyed and exhausted by the landscape assembled from inherited memory. The oysters recall my great-great-grandparents' oyster bar in Raleigh, North Carolina, a place that exists for me less as a documented history than as a constellation of family stories. Oysters carry their own layered histories as well: keystone species, symbols of protection and vulnerability, luxury and necessity, desire and survival.

The figure does not lie on a literal midden but within one—a terrain where personal memory, family mythology, ecological history, and material culture settle into one another. Like the shell mounds that endure long after the people who formed them, the sculpture imagines inheritance as an accumulation: fragments gathered over generations, quietly shaping the ground upon which we come to rest.