Portable Petroglyphs No. 1-3
Created October 2025
While at a residency at PLAYA Summer Lake, I traipsed over a rubble-strewn landscape to find some of the local petroglyphs, which were hard to find in the sheen of the light drizzle. I had come under the spell of this form of rock art during an earlier trip through New Mexico with my partner Morgan, and now I was confronted with experiencing some petroglyphs by myself. Sure, I could take photographs to share with Morgan, but that felt rather insufficient, especially with the poor visual conditions on the day I was exploring them. Instead, I came up with the idea of ‘Portable Petroglyphs,’ embroidered recreations of designs from the site, sewn onto black denim and then tailored onto volcanic rocks from the area.
Making these Portable Petroglyphs became a nice break from some of the larger projects I was working on during the residency, and they gave me space to think about the legacy of vandalism as souvenir, how many of the petroglyphs in the area had been chipped off of the rocks and taken as tokens by the white colonizers of the area. Such acts really speak, beyond the obvious genocidal disregard to the indigenous peoples and their culture, to a selfish lack of creativity and laziness. One of the aims of the Portable Petroglyphs project is to question routes of transmissibility for culture and propose an alternative, less destructive, and more personal version of the souvenir.
