Extended Whirlpool of Negatives

Artist Statement

Darkened skies, shadowed craters in the ground, piles of rubble, pockmarked walls, bridges with railings turned into roadblocks, houses with the walls sheared off, boulders that block paths, slabs of broken concrete, rising dark water filled with floating debris, felled trees and sinkholes. The landscape itself is the threat. These works convey the chaos that war and environmental disaster brings to a place.

As we look around we wonder, where is this, what happened here, why? The once occupied landscape is a no-go zone. Streets are passageways that must be negotiated and scrutinized for dangers both underfoot and overhead, for hidden traps or threats. Water has become fouled and dangerous, air has become rank, mingled with particles of soil and poison. Where did everyone go? Hostile territory, a ravaged landscape—the disasters of war, environmental degradation and man-made zones ravaged for resources then abandoned.

This work is about loss. The drawings serve as mediations and records of both places and states that either no longer exist or are in the process of disappearing. These constructed landscapes piece together fragmented scenes of conflict, abandonment, and disarray and attempt to link ecological and psychological upheaval. Firsthand experiences of loss, as well as the residual effects passed down through family and community. How do we synthesize the felt, seen, or told narratives that continue as reminders and echoes of suffering or sacrifices?

This work took its form in 2016 when I began to formalize my drawings in direct response to Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings in which text complements the scene and suggests a narrative of evolving events. The extent of the series currently consists of over one hundred individual works on paper in a 1:3 format to exaggerate an expansive horizon on which a drama unfolds.

Each time I returned to Goya’s images I felt their relevance and persistent contemporaneity. All the distinct works consist of India ink forms collaged and/or fragmented into a disjointed simulacrum of contradictory natures and contrarian ideals. They reference both corporeal and emotive experiences that suggest displacement and the pervasive uncertainty that’s created while asking how the physical and psychological upheaval can take on similar shapes. These abstract spaces also act as visual metaphors emblematic of shifts in the social fabric and hybridization of our communities as well as ecological imbalances. They frame expansive spaces through landscape markers alongside quiet, removed isolated pockets in which the viewer can settle.

Of her collaboration with the poet Julia Johnson, Mariam says: “I wanted to find a poet that complements and adds to the ambiguity and abstraction within my work through text… The sense of loss, polarization, and fracturing that I have attempted to construct in these images is meant to simultaneously reflect upon and memorialize the time we live in and recognize our shared accountability.”

#331 FAVORABLE WIND

You are part of this landscape, pocked
pocketed beauty housed in the mind like a disappearing
railcar, faces seen looking out, circular depressions of comets
colliding–a guesthouse, they say.
How is it that the well-preserved young craters, 50,000 years old, seem brand new?
We can lie down in the complex ones. The wind costs us—brilliant and timeless as it is,
but we can still see basaltic Moon mare from Earth. (Title by Julia Johnson)

6 x 18″, India ink on paper, 2024

#335 NEAR THE TRAILING EDGE

We pass around errors of our own making
On little white plates
The rotating column of air touched the ground and took
Us all with it
The damage path perfect, larger than we can see from here
A cloud of debris sings before it hits the ground again
Nobody is here, nothing, not even the soft filling of a mattress
That held our heads
The ribs of every tree still healing
We overhear the last light dim, stunned by intractable gusts. (Title by Julia Johnson)

6 x 18″, India ink on paper, 2024