/ Inverted Tiles

Inverted tiles are about extraction, making and books. It is a critical exploration of extracting land and placing an artwork in another artwork. The story begins in Wendover, in a residency at CLUI, The Centre for Land Use Interpretation. It was the hottest day of the fall. We found ourselves in the desert in Utah, with a limited water supply and 104 degrees. Yet, we spent the day at South base, a military plane turned artist residency, blazing in the sun. There was nowhere to hide. An abandoned field, the site used to be the most extensive bombing and gunnery range in the world; they even trained pilots in how to drop atomic bombs here in the 40s. We dug into the flat, collecting white salt-rich clay and used that to make tiles on the spot with a wooden frame. The tiles dried quickly in the heat.

The following week, we travelled in two trucks from Utah to Nevada. Carefully packed, the handmade tiles survived climbing Moapa Valley on Mormon Mesa near Overton. We lived for a week in Michael Heizer's Double Negative, a section of extracted land, forming a piece of land art (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide) across the mesa, made in 1969. Living in an extracted land sculpture had a profound effect on us. At first, it wasn't easy to grasp. Saturated, we began to understand. The artwork protected us from the sun, wind and the hardness of the mesa; it became our habitat. Our walls and interiors. Imported, the tiles became symbols of domestic life. Placed in Double Negative, the objects became inverted shapes of Heizer's work—books on a shelf, captured in a series of photographs that explored our habitat creation. Inverted tiles: extracted earth from the gun land in Utah, shaped on site, placed in a trench sculpture in Nevada.