Sometimes Island

Sometimes Island-- a landmass that comes and goes at the control of the nearby dam-- becomes a site to explore social, environmental and embodied grief, loss and longing.

Sometimes Island was once a hill. Now it is sometimes underwater or sometimes an island but I first encountered it last year as a peninsula. Lake Travis, the reservoir surrounding the ambivalent land mass, was created by the construction of Mansfield Dam for flood control, water storage, and production of hydroelectricity and has recently displayed lower than average water levels. Bringing together photography, video, performance and found materials, I create a case study of  Sometimes Island, which becomes a site of possibility for slow practices within the built environment.

What began as a social, environmental project has evolved into an emotional undertaking to understand my attachment to Sometimes Island as a place in flux -- as a reflection of an internal space. What does it look like to move through a landscape of grief? How does a landscape hold longing? In my emotional need for the ground, what is the ground made of? How do you trace an island whose edges are constantly changing? My sister took her life in March 2023 and in the year following her death these questions have occupied my mind. Sometimes Island became a space to project this loss onto. An empty stage that changes scenery every day. 

This work is a series of rituals. I walk to the island once a month, collect as much clay as I can hold in my hands, I gather stories from others I encounter within this site, and filmed the island disappearing under the total solar eclipse. Within the narration, the physical act of tracing what could disappear underwater becomes a psychological act of remembering. The works within the overarching project of Sometimes Island want to hold that tenuous space where the environmental meets the personal and the personal meets the collective. Ultimately, the collective will meet the spiritual, and the spiritual is left up for our own interpretation.