NARS Fellowship, 2024 Session III, International Artist Residency
Brooklyn, NY

work in progress

Studio Views at NARS Foundation

My current work engages the notion of always becoming: the ever-evolving process of creation. Every day, this setting evolves with the detritus from the streets transmuting into altars of resilience and healing. Enmeshed within the immersive sculptural collage of drawings, photo-collages, and natural geologic and botanic materials from biologically threatened lands in my native Pakistan and adopted home in the US. Projecting personal and inner psychic landscape juxtaposed with physical and cultural, inviting reckoning and reconciliation, reflection and meditation. Landscapes of majestic beauty, and of extinction and erasure—of lives/life-ways, ecosystems, women’s craft and labor.  Landscape of renewed hope, cultivating new futures. Personally, as an artist; as a people, and as the earth seeks continually to heal itself. I confront environmental racism, writ large and small. From issues of access to green space, to large-scale climate catastrophe and its disproportionate burden on already marginalized populations globally. For me, immersive art may act a conduit to make tangible transformative encounters with the earth. I confront the effects of (dis)connection with the earth. Employing public art in service of community healing, my installations offer aesthetic sanctuaries, seeking relation to the land outside colonial, capitalist modes of living — of territorial possession or land extraction. Finding mutual care.

Restored Landscapes (Unearthing Stories From The Core) 2024

Public parks developed on landfills in New York City

We are intermeshed with the subterranean realities on which we stand. A substantial part of NY sits over landfills. Many have been converted into parks: Governors Island, Battery, Gateway, Pelham Bay, Fresh Kills, even Ellis Island.

Land(scape) is a repository—concealing and preserving our history and our future. The history of soil layers is that of micro- and macro histories. How are we altered by the environment we have altered? New York offers an exceptionally rich development on my work examining the earth as a repository for trauma and history, as well as a source for healing. On land-fill—the residue of past human lives—the resonant terrestrial quality is activated and amplified. What energy does this anthropocentric form of 'soil' bring as different from a lithosphere of rock and mineral? NYC becomes a site where the act of walking and entanglement of matter are activated with the energy of their own pasts. My work speaks to inter-connectedness: of humans with the earth; with humans to each other, and to life; of the local & the global; of the micro & the cosmic.

What does healing look like when brought to nature itself? Pattern governs the order of creation, how do we replicate it when brought to mend the ecosystems we’ve destroyed? Substantial parts of NYC rest on filled land: the refuse of our past. Most recently, the largest public park spaces are built atop landfills as we seek to repurpose that which we’ve cast away, but are unable to disappear. Freshkills park rests on a garbage dump, offering one of the most potent transfigurations imaginable: the reviled castoff detritus of everyday modern life, into precious urban greenspace. One day, the traces of this manufacture will become another layer in the Earth’s crust; my work documents this process of change.

Governors Island, NYC

How are we altered by the environment we have altered? More than half of Governors Island is built on a landfill, 100 of its 172 acres, the entire south side. The lush Hills on the South with views of the Statue of Liberty and the NY Harbor sit on mounds of landfill, soil dug to build part of NY’s subway system. This “land reclamation” has led to sinking of Governors Island at a rate of 3.4 mm (plus or minus 0.8 millimeters) per year, one of the fastest sinking rates of NY locations.

Governors Island has also historically been the site of hazardous waste. From petroleum spills in the groundwater, to subsurface contamination in buildings and the soil. Arriving at the island by ferry and departing from it, one sees the spectacular views of the NY harbor. But as I walk the island, art and nature are mixed with relics of the past, crumbling structures, hints of the lush oasis betraying glimpses of structures keeping the soil in place, debris on the coast, fenced areas with fragments of history scattered around. Mounds of shells fenced in for recycling, views of the Statue of Liberty bearing witness. An island sinking would be far from anyone’s mind in this hub of arts, recreation, leisure, and always nature’s resilience and beauty.

Freshkills Park, Staten Island, NYC

Visit with private tour of portions still in planning or under construction. Freshkills Park sits on Fresh Kills Landfill which was the largest landfill in the world by 1955 and the largest landfill in the US until it closed in 2001. It is the largest park to be developed in NY in over 100 years, at three times the size of Central Park.

North Mound, completed 2023

Grasslands on trash mounds with layers of soil, gas vents, drainage, and barrier protection material, between the waste and soil layers. Landfill gas well header pipes dotting the landscape.

“Landfill gas is created as anaerobic bacteria feed on decomposing waste. The gas is a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide, and small amounts of non-methane organic compounds. The landfill cap prevents landfill gas from migrating into the atmosphere. Below the cap, a network of wells, pipes and blowers collect landfill gas from the capped landfill mounds and send it to an onsite purification plant.”

Sunset at North Mound

Scale of grasses at Freshkills with Shannon Erickson, Director of Education, Freshkills Parks Alliance

Liminal Spaces. Scattered in the gravel: remnants of lives past.

Between the mounds grasses and plants grow, brought by the wind from unknown places. Seeds geminate, forming new habitats.

Leachate Collection System

“Leachate is created when rainwater percolates through decomposing garbage and picks up particles, including potential contaminants, from the garbage along the way. At Freshkills Park, the soil underlying the waste is made of a fine silt clay with low permeability. The clay prevents leachate from migrating into deeper layers of soil below the landfill. Around the mounds, trenches, cut-off walls, pipes, and pumps are designed to collect the leachate that migrates laterally through the mounds. The collected leachate is pumped to a treatment plant that separates clean water from harmful waste materials.”

Plant Flare Stations

Vents transport gas to plant flare stations where it is stored and burnt off. There is of flare station at each of the four mounds at Freshkills.

Sunset at South Mound

Unit-Antler, mixed media, 2024

Crafted entirely from detritus and wood collected from NYC. An interactive sculptural contrivance. A psychic, futuristic landscape portal, a telepoter. A memory object, for reminding and forgetting. Preserving our history and future. Connecting humans, landscape, and its residuals.

First Reponses

Rooftops from the car driving into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

A cultural landsacpe, a time capsule of chimneys, graffiti, tangled wires; a labyrinth of antennae, dishes. I was offered different stories for this: open, clandestine labyrinth transmission devices, private servers. Beyond governmental surveillance, a US mediated view of the outside world. Signifiers of immigrants, connecting with families; receiving news, from channels and in languages. Beyond modern cable networks, the obsolete systems live on

Sculpture Center Courtyard, NYC

Boundaries of landscape dissolving, morphing. Like our own fragmented, fluid selves.

“In the wake of dissolution of her body…Trauma: a weight that slowly, over time, breaks you down, your bones crumbling into moon dust…A type of vertigo, traumatic memory, a type of forgetting, the fear, a type of remembering too much.” – Maryam Ahmad

View from NARS rooftop, NYC

©2024 Sarah Ahmad. All Rights Reserved.