No Trespassing: Sacred Land
Enviornmental Installation
Photographs, sand, cedar, mulch, ornamental grass, shells, wampum,
rocks, soil, wood, twine
2023
No Trespassing: Sacred Land is an environmental installation and tribute to Chappaquiddick Island, the ancestral homeland of the Chappaquiddick Wampanoag Tribe. Built from sand, cedar, shells, wampum, soil, and archival imagery gathered from the homelands, the installation imagines an unhindered relationship to Indigenous land—free from the barriers that continue to obstruct access to sacred spaces stewarded by Wampanoag people.
A twine barrier separates viewers from the installation, confronting them with questions of access, boundaries, and who is permitted to occupy space. Yet footprints remain visible within the sand, revealing the environment as lived in, inhabited, and carried through ongoing presence rather than absence. The work reflects on the ways people push against boundaries while asking viewers to consider their own positionality, whose land they occupy, and the systems that continue to mediate Indigenous access to Indigenous land.
Throughout the exhibition, the living plants within the installation were watered and cared for, reinforcing relationships to stewardship, reciprocity, and maintenance. The space was not treated as static, but as living—holding memory, history, and continued presence. Four black-framed photographs referencing the four directions and circle of life ground the installation in ancestral accountability and cosmological continuity. Natural materials function not as symbols, but as active carriers of land, memory, and responsibility. This is more than landscape. This is sacred land.