Looking at the Sky from Above

Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University Bloomington, IA | 2005

Looking at the Sky from Above is a site-specific installation that immerses the viewer in a mapped landscape where coast and sky converge and collapse into one another. A continuous coastline is painted in blue across the walls, ceiling, and floor of the gallery, transforming the architectural space into an enveloping field of contour and line. The blue references the color of NOAA nautical charts—maps the artist remembers from childhood, growing up near the ocean in a place where such charts were essential tools for navigating water and space.

Layered atop the painted coastline are delicate pencil lines tracing the shifting contours of cloud formations. These drawn cloudlines introduce a second mapping system—one that is fleeting and unstable—set against the relative permanence of the shore. The layering mirrors the lived experience of coastal environments, where land, water, and sky are read simultaneously and stillness and movement are in constant negotiation.

Rather than positioning the viewer as grounded and looking upward, the installation suggests a disorienting inversion—as if hovering above the landscape, reading sky and coast as overlapping surfaces. Coastlines begin to resemble cloudlines; clouds echo the shape of land. Through this collapsing of perspectives, the work draws connections between mapping and memory, between the reliability of geographic reference points and the temporal nature of clouds and water. The installation reflects broader rhythms of time and change, revealing landscape not as a fixed boundary, but as a continually shifting system shaped by perception, movement, and return.