The Tell

The Tell (2026)

The Tell is an installation exploring how landscapes hold memory, history, and buried narratives—how places “remember” what has been extracted, covered, or forgotten. It brings together layered materials and forms to think through land, time, and the traces left behind, as well as the precarity of economic systems that treat land as if it has no memory.

The work draws on the idea of a “tell,” an archaeological mound formed by successive layers of settlement, abandonment, and rebuilding. In this sense, landscapes become stratified records of survival, collapse, and resistance, where history is compressed into material form. The installation mirrors this logic through layered objects that hold both geological and industrial time, including sandstone, plant matter, and fordite—an industrial byproduct of layered automotive paint that reads as an artificial geology.

Together these elements frame landscape not as a neutral surface, but as an active archive shaped by extraction, residue, and uneven cycles of renewal and resistance, where what is buried continues to exert pressure on the present.

The Tell was commissioned by the Medina Triennial for its inaugural edition.

Special thanks to my art students Audie D’Amico, Thomas Walsh and Max Flanigan who helped with the production and installation.