Karla García
Artist

Archive of Land

Beneath the undulating dunes of the Sandhills, wild grasses drink from the Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient, invisible source of water that has sustained this land and its people for generations. An Archive of Land is a site-specific ceramic installation born from this place, treating the land itself as a living record: ecological, cultural, and a part of our existence.

The installation takes root in the kitchen of the Armstrong House Museum in Rushville, Nebraska. A kitchen, like an aquifer, is a site of nourishment, labor, and connection. A place where knowledge passes between hands, where heritage is preserved in the gestures of daily life. The objects here carry the traces of the families who used them. Standing among them, I felt inspired from this archive of past life to create.

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Author Mari Sandoz understood the plains as a keeper of story, a landscape where the grasses growing from sand dunes are always in conversation with those who live among them. This installation begins there. I moved through the Sandhills slowly, visiting national parks, the livestock auction, local shops, museums, and a herbarium, collecting wild flora and photographing the land, and watched cows roam across the prairie. This experience deepened my understanding of what it means to belong to this place. I recognized something familiar in the sand beneath the grass, a reminder of the desert where I grew up.

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Back in my studio, I built a series of ceramic grass forms and mixed wild clay into the glaze. These ceramic grasses are installed among the museum's historic objects, appearing to grow from the kitchen floor becoming a surreal prairie, domestic and wild at once. I wonder what it means to find yourself standing in a kitchen among something as restless and alive as the prairie grass of the Sandhills.