Sustain

Much of my work deals with a duality on some level, be it masculine/feminine, work/domestic, rural/urban, etc.  Sustain explores the tobacco industry in Kentucky and how tobacco carries many connotations, most negative.  Tobacco has been a cash crop for centuries, for small individual holdings to larger plantations, and because it’s the south, pre and post emancipation,  providing industry for rural farms and people all the while contributing cancer and corruption in the rest of the country.  

Copper tobacco leaves are pressed and patinated and hung to dry.  Some are cast into molten glass, effectively preserving them forever. 

The copper oxidizes when incased in the glass, creating a variegated surface of reds, browns, blacks, blues and polished copper resembling the colors of barn-curing tobacco.  This tobacco plant is preserved and protected within its glass confines as a valuable object of precious metal.  The glass has the effect of stopping time—preventing any further corrosion of the copper within it and freezing it in place by fusing it to the glass itself.

Some leaves are not incased and allowed to oxidized and corrode to a flat black/green.  These leaves are “burnt,” “rotten,” “forgotten”—relics of a tarnished past.

What is worth preserving?