UPDATE: 8/21/2010
This is the photograph that inspired my collective’s call for entries, “Visual Response to the Gulf Oil Disaster.” I grew up playing on the beach on Galveston Island and swimming in Galveston Bay. My parents bought a rickety old cottage on the shore of Galveston Bay in the early 1980s and we would go down there on weekends as often as we could. After my father was killed in a bicycle accident, my mother moved out there and fixed the place up. She build beautiful English style gardens, including a garden to attract butterflies. She became interested in local ecology and volunteered at the nearby nature center. She would tell anyone who asked about the plight of her favorite bird, the yellow crowned night heron. From her house on the bay you could see seabirds, boats and fires from refineries. Right before my tobacco free mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in 2005, a Texas City Refinery (owned by BP) exploded killing 15 people and injuring 170 others. This same year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and Hurricane Rita forced us all to evacuate. My aunt drove my mother, who was too sick to fly to my grandmother’s house in Arlington. She couldn’t walk at that point or use the restroom by herself. What was normally a 5 hour drive, took 12 hours. She died two months later, and my sister and I held on to the house for a couple years longer, selling it just months before it was destroyed by Hurricane Ike.
I took this photograph in May of this year when the oil gusher had just begun. I desperately wanted more information about what was going on, but all I could see were aerial photographs of an orangish slick substance. I spoke to my boyfriend on the phone, who theorized that this disaster could cause a slick around the world. I went shopping at Home Goods and spotted this globe along with a box of gummi letters. I took them home and made the photograph in a day. I like how the gummi letters look eerie when lit. At the time nobody was talking about the “spill.” I’m not sure whether it was too scary for people or whether people in the rest of the country just didn’t feel like it effected them. Now, this has changed. I think people are beginning to understand that what happens in the Gulf doesn’t end in the Gulf. The Foster Collective’s Gulf Oil Disaster Response received entries from all over the country and even one from Italy. It was an inclusive project (no-jury/no-fee), which allowed artists to make sense of the tragedy through what they do best, making art. Soon it will be traveling to a gallery in Huntsville, Alabama and I hope to other places too.