The land holds its injuries in pattern.

Open pit mines, tailings ponds, lithium mines, irrigation circles: from above, the marks we leave on the earth resolve into something almost ornamental. Disturbed Ground explores these aerial geometries of extraction, the slow return of vegetation to scarred ground, and the formal, alien beauty of things that probably shouldn't be beautiful at all.

I work from a personal archive of satellite imagery, hundreds of images of mines, quarries, salt flats, and agricultural systems, looking for the moments where industrial logic and natural process start to blur together. A center pivot irrigation field is a circle drawn by machinery, but given enough time it also becomes a record of drought, of soil exhaustion, of whatever manages to grow back at the edges. A tailings pond is a wound, but it's also a surface, with its own colors and currents and slow chemistry. I'm interested in that double reading, the engineered and the organic occupying the same mark.

Nothing in these places is finished. They're always mid-transformation, and the changes happening now sit right on top of the changes that came before. That layering is central to this work. These landscapes carry the ghosts of past use the way old paper carries the impression of writing that's been erased. A mine closes, but the pit remains, filling slowly with water and color. A field gets abandoned, but the lines of the irrigation system stay legible in the vegetation for decades. The land doesn't forget. It just keeps writing new marks over the old ones, so that what you're looking at is never really one moment, it's an accumulation of all the moments that got there, and a suggestion of moments to come.

Using code as a drawing instrument, each piece in the series is built as a system rather than a single image. I write rules for how marks accumulate, how lines erode, how scars form and sometimes heal over. Then I let the system run. The process is inexorable: once the rules are set, the piece develops according to its own internal logic, the way a landscape develops according to geology, weather, and use. What comes out the other side is a one time accumulation of thousands of small decisions made by the code, but it's also legible as part of a family. You can see the shared DNA across pieces even as each one finds its own form.

Disturbed Ground isn't trying to make a tidy argument about extraction or land use. It's more interested in sitting with the contradiction: that the places we've damaged most are often the places that produce the strangest, most unexpected beauty, and that beauty doesn't cancel out the damage, it just sits alongside it. The work is an attempt to hold both of those things at once, in a form that keeps generating new versions of that tension, piece after piece.