LOCAL COLOR PROJECT

Artist Statement:

Local Color is a collection of paintings made with watercolor pigments I produce from locally sourced plants, minerals, and decomposed or oxidized metals. Each work functions as a record of place, where color is not chosen but derived—emerging directly from the materials available within a specific biosphere.

Through processes of foraging, extraction, and pigment-making, I enter into a reciprocal relationship with the land. Plants are boiled, metals are rusted, minerals are ground—each material carrying its own temporality, chemistry, and threshold of transformation. The resulting colors are unstable and alive: they shift, fade, deepen, and resist full control. These paintings hold that variability, rejecting the fixity often expected of image-making.

Composed as minimal color fields, the works resist representation in favor of presence. Subtle gradients, stains, and accumulations reveal the movement of water, the saturation of pigment, and the hand’s repeated gestures. What appears at first as a single tone unfolds into layered histories—of extraction, labor, environment, and time.

Rooted in Detroit, this series engages a landscape shaped by both industrial residue and ecological regeneration. Oxidized metals reference the city’s material past, while plant-based pigments speak to ongoing cycles of growth and repair. By working exclusively with what is locally accessible, I situate the practice within the ethics of limitation, attunement, and care.

Local Color asks what it means to make color with, rather than from, the land—to treat pigment not as a neutral tool, but as a collaborator and witness. Each painting becomes an index of relationship: between body and environment, between extraction and reciprocity, and between permanence and change.