Consumed

My students threw away more paint than they used. I began peeling the dried skins off their palettes — pounds of color, hardened, discarded before it ever reached a canvas.

Every work here is made from that waste. Nothing new was bought.

What the waste becomes is the subject: flood, fire, hurricane, retreating ice, the drain, the pipe, the sewage. We take more than we need and call the remainder someone else’s problem. Fire does not distinguish between the two.

We consume. Then we are consumed.