My Time on a Spoil Island
On my way back from a week alone on a spoil island in the Laguna Madre, a friend asked me, “Does it feel like stepping back through the looking glass?”
“No,” I said. “It feels like I was finally touching real life—and now I’m walking back into a world that makes no sense.”
Studies suggest that our nervous systems begin to reset after three full days immersed in nature. This residency gave me the chance to test that theory.
I remember thinking: yes, this is essential.
South Texas Residency
Art Center of Corpus Christi and Texas A&M- Corpus Christi’s Center for Coastal Studies
Creating a New Body of Work
Now, over a year after the residency, I’m still finishing paintings that began there. Part of that is the nature of my process—slow, layered, built over time. But it’s also because that place didn’t just give me images; it shifted the way I see. The work continues to unfold long after the moment of observation.
Some of the new work I’m making in my time since isn’t coastal at all—cactus, shadows, patterns in the land—but they’re still rooted in what I learned on that island. The residency sharpened my attention to the way multiple elements coexist and speak to one another: wind, light, texture, movement, history. That way of listening now runs through everything I make.
The paintings in this ongoing series trace those connections. They grow out of the hundreds of photographs and field studies I brought back, but also from the slower, quieter understandings that surfaced only once I returned home. Each work carries its own voice, and together they build something larger—an accumulation of perspectives shaped by time, memory, and place.
