CYCLES OF
DELINEATION I
Cycles of Delineation I
Fired clay, 66ft.
Related exhibition:
Beyond the Plot: Resistance Against the Delineation of Land and Practice in Agriculture, 2026, Experimental Gallery, Cornell University.
Fired clay, 66ft.
Related exhibition:
Beyond the Plot: Resistance Against the Delineation of Land and Practice in Agriculture, 2026, Experimental Gallery, Cornell University.
Cycles of Delineation is a dual sculpture reinterpreting the 66 ft. long Gunter’s chain, one of the first standardized land-measuring tools used by early English surveyors and the primary instrument to segment the land that is now referred to as the United States of America into acres.
Cycles of Delineation I is made in clay, the constitutive and life-giving element of the land that the original instrument was designed to divide. While still technically capable of measuring and dividing space, the chain remains brittle: a structure simultaneously hard and fragile.
Cycles of Delineation II is a reinterpretation of the modern surveying tape. While retaining the chain’s original length of 66 feet, this piece is made in canvas onto which excerpts of both historical and contemporary land acts and agricultural policy were screen-printed.
Together, both pieces serve as tools to spatialize history and point to how old colonial power structures and narratives, based on violent, racial, and oppressive ideologies, are sustained and reinscribed in cyclical ways through contemporary surveying tools and laws.
Cycles of Delineation I is made in clay, the constitutive and life-giving element of the land that the original instrument was designed to divide. While still technically capable of measuring and dividing space, the chain remains brittle: a structure simultaneously hard and fragile.
Cycles of Delineation II is a reinterpretation of the modern surveying tape. While retaining the chain’s original length of 66 feet, this piece is made in canvas onto which excerpts of both historical and contemporary land acts and agricultural policy were screen-printed.
Together, both pieces serve as tools to spatialize history and point to how old colonial power structures and narratives, based on violent, racial, and oppressive ideologies, are sustained and reinscribed in cyclical ways through contemporary surveying tools and laws.
Workshop:
From Land to Relational Territory
From Land to Relational Territory
13 August, 2026
Lait-Z-Érables — Art dans l’Horta, Saint-Georges-de-Windsor
Hosted by:
École buissonnière 2026, summer school by The Decolonial Art and
Research Laboratory (LabARD), in collaboration in partnership with the
Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, University.
The workshop was held at Lait-Z-Érables farm, situated on the unceded traditional lands of the Abenaki Nation, and served as a closing moment for the 2026 summer school, École buissonnière: Thinking-feeling the Land as Diasporic Territory.
Gathered around the piece Cycles of Delineation I, participants were invited to expand the vocabulary governing dominant agricultural narratives. By contributing words drawn from their own histories and geographies, they articulated alternative relationships to land, place, knowledge, and the myriad beings that sustain life.
As participants read their contributions aloud, they arranged their written stories along the ceramic chain, gradually composing a collective map. To conclude, I invited everyone to step forward together onto the ceramic chain—a cacophony of fractures that marks our collective capacity to fissure power structures, such as dominant agricultural narratives.
-> Project website
Gathered around the piece Cycles of Delineation I, participants were invited to expand the vocabulary governing dominant agricultural narratives. By contributing words drawn from their own histories and geographies, they articulated alternative relationships to land, place, knowledge, and the myriad beings that sustain life.
As participants read their contributions aloud, they arranged their written stories along the ceramic chain, gradually composing a collective map. To conclude, I invited everyone to step forward together onto the ceramic chain—a cacophony of fractures that marks our collective capacity to fissure power structures, such as dominant agricultural narratives.
-> Project website