Exhibit and Pigment Workshops

Throughout an eight-week residency at The Small Center at Tulane University, Kira Akerman and Dr. Robin McDowell created an art exhibit to accompany Kira’s film Hollow Tree, as well as a series of pigment-making workshops. The aim was to deepen the learning experience of viewing the film through art-making, reflection, and conversation. Selected works from the exhibit Inhabitation and a description of the pigment-making workshop appear below.

The River by Kira Akerman

Plantation Imagination by Dr. Robin McDowell

PIGMENT-MAKING WORKSHOPS

The workshop begins with an informational talk and demonstration of methods for incorporating archives and ethnography in environmental art-making. Dr. Robin McDowell, who appears as one of the teachers in Hollow Tree, explains how she has followed the intertwined histories of oil, salt, and sugar in Louisiana’s sinking wetlands, and came to realize the perverse metabolism of natural resource extraction at the expense of Black lives and labor. She offers a provocation: the molecular structures of soil and water collected from former plantation sites are evolving and restructuring themselves due to ecological, economic, racial, and psychological violence and theft enacted upon the environment by European settlers, plantation owners, and corporations. As the pigments crystallize, oxidize, melt, dissipate, and congeal over time, visual and tactile stories emerge through the rendering of new creative and interpretive possibilities from materials themselves.

Participants work together to create watercolor pigments from ethically foraged organic materials including soil, clay, silt, rock salt, and carbon byproducts from research sites in south Louisiana.

Participants then learn hands-on techniques for creating paints with soil and other organic matter and take home a small pigment pot created during the workshop.

As participants examine and work with the materials, they engage in discussion about the materials themselves, as well as the histories of the peoples, lands, and bodies of water where the materials were first encountered.