Both Toxic and Miraculous is a very personal piece. It was made during the Southern Studies Fellowship in Spartanburg, SC. As my collaborator, Morgan Thomas, and myself researched the region and discovered a legacy of polluted waterways and toxic ideology (the founding pastor of First Baptist, Spartanburg was a signer of the Ordanance of Seccession from the Union in 1860), I grappled with my own past in the region - a painful time for my family when I was eight-years old. Taking the opportunity of proximity, I drove the three hours from Spartanburg to Hemingway where I reconnected with old family friends and brought back to my studio thirty-gallons of Hemingway clay that had just been treated with pesticides. I then cast my own body in lead, baptizing it in a water trough filled with the soil from Hemingway as an archeological visualization of the legacies and implications of personal and national history. (First exhibited at Glendale Shoals, Spartanburg, SC.)
