Jessica Marshall E., Michael and I made 12,500 pounds of adobe bricks for the Urban Tumulus installation this past July. Earth, sand, straw, water. Each air-dried brick measures 5 inches by 10 inches by 16 inches, and weighs 50 pounds. I don’t know how heavy they were when they were wet and newly unmolded. We made 250 bricks. The weather was damnably hot, bright, and dry, the hottest week of the summer, with temperatures ranging from 98 to 103 degrees. Making adobe is brutal physical labor, each day we needed to make between 35 -45 bricks. At the end of each day we were trashed. All of us who were involved with the project have a deep appreciation for the labor that goes into building an adobe dwelling.
The reddish adobe bricks are made up of Metro Atlanta ’s red clay subsoil.
The sanitary mulch was generated from Atlanta Metro yard waste.
The Wild Grasses were collected from sidewalks in southwest Atlanta.
Drought hardened red clay picked and shoveled and full of debris: broken glass, bits of tiles, broken pieces of rusty metal.
Out of the 12,500 pounds of brick we made, we only used 11,000 pounds of adobe to line the corridor of the Urban Tumulus. At six foot two inches tall, 10 inches wide and about 21 feet long, its not enough adobe to build a one room house. Three pillars, or buttresses, provide additional support in the back. It amazes me how heavy earth is, how Solid. Earth feels reassuring and secure under our feet. Some phrases reflect the reassuring aspect of our relationship to soil. We are “on solid ground.” We can be “well-grounded.” We have “grounds” for a belief, an opinion or theory. The smell of newly tilled soil is wholesome, even comforting. When earth is under foot, all is well.
The tumulus is not underfoot.
- pandra
November 7th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
URBAN TUMULUS @ EYEDRUM
Constructed from the environment immediately around us, Urban Tumulus invites us to engage and participate. It says so much in its beautiful silence. It is at once an experience, activated by the involvement of the viewer, as it is also simply wanting to be.
Pandra Williams has directed the creation of something that has been created as a piece of art as well as something that is asking to not be art, but to be as close to real as possible. It takes this dynamic one step further by concealing its true nature.It’s ingredients play a strange trick on the person interacting with it. It is a piece of unique beauty, while at once is a thing of commonalities. It wants you to understand that this is every day. You should appreciate it. Its elements, individuated are common wild grasses from metro Atlanta’s sidewalks, Georgia red clay, glass, tile, bits of metal, debris. Commonly found elements in the urban experience. Even things we consider or do not consider as we ourselves discard and create it. Things we walk past all the time in the city.
Urban Tumulus is very purposefully designed to enter. As a tumulus, something commonly associated with burial mounds, it suggests the fact that it is alive while manifested from inert objects. The human involvement in the making of this creation is brought to mind. The sheer weight and mass of the object existing before the viewer, having an unreal and very earthbound human experience. It is also an artistic experience, an observation that is dependant on your involvement. Just as our environment is a beuatuful thing we travel through, taking for granted as well as stoppping to find the wonder in the details.
This installation invites you inside to consider how it came to be, to be with it, and to be part of it. It asks you to walk back out and hopefully carry some of this consideration with you in your daily travels.
Urban Tumulus is on display at eyedrum as part of their Dead Flowers exhibit