Emily Budd
Tamarisk and Clam Auto-Fossilization Memorial
2024
Found object, cast bronze
Gift of the artist

"The great Bathtub Ring of the sinking Lake Mead is a mineralized and neo-fossilized landscape of young ruins caused by the diminishing reservoir. This monument to abandoned futures provides a conceptual backdrop for Tamarisk and Clam Auto-Fossilization Memorial. The bronze cast portion uses traditional monument materiality to retain archival documentation of plant and animal remains that mark the ground of lands once long underwater. These fragments are reimagined to seek queer renewal within the liminal spaces of time created by the failed, abandoned, and discarded. “Auto-fossilization” is my term to describe the intentional release of a failed past to make room for future transformation, inspired by geologic change. Engaging with disturbed landscapes and discarded materials, I relate this to queer abandonment and the subsequently-earned intuition to seek love and renewal in ruin." Emily Budd, August 2024

Introduction
The great Bathtub Ring of the sinking Lake Mead is a mineralized and neo-fossilized landscape of young ruins caused by the diminishing reservoir. This monument to abandoned futures provides a conceptual backdrop for the fictional archive I’ve compiled in Abandoned Lot, Secluded Cove.

Pulling from the material foundations of an historical archive, and connecting to Susan Sontag's claim in On
Photography, I believe metal casting also captures and “testifies to time’s relentless melt.” I combine both here to explore evidence of a queered relationship to nonlinear time, where this entropic melting gathers in unrecognized spaces. Between presence and nonpresence lies the opportunity for wild visualizations, the remaking of the past, and reimagining how we see futures.

I question a nonfictional approach, because deep and intersectional queer ancestry continues to be systematically erased and abandoned using these tools. Therefore I find truth in fiction, by creating new forms out of the trashed remains of failed reclamation. Engaging with disturbed landscapes and discarded materials, I relate this to queer abandonment and the subsequently-earned intuition to seek love and renewal in ruin.

As Cheryl Dunye iconically stated in The Watermelon Woman, “Sometimes you have to create your own history.”

My practice traverses the mystery, awkwardness, survival, and ultimate expansion of queer desire and futurity. A background in foundry craft and paleontology inspires an interest for geologic-scale transformations as an act of queer placemaking. I use casting techniques to excavate an imagined queer fossil record, create monuments to lost histories, capture moments of radical remaking, and document the volcanic movement of imminent forces towards change. Nontraditional techniques in foundry craft and metalwork allow me to navigate between structure and experimentation within a queer context, exploring the possibilities of a separated difference.

Abandoned Lot, Secluded Cove is my fictional archive of a changing Lake Mead and its ruins, a series of
fragments that seek portals to queer renewal within the liminal states of time created by the failed, abandoned, and discarded.