“…the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack.” — Dr. Christina Sharpe
“Weathering is about hopeful, hardworking, responsible, skilled, and resilient people dying from the physical toll of constant stress on their bodies, paying with their health because they live in a rigged, degrading, and exploitative system.” — Dr. Arline T. Geronimus
In Borderlands, abstraction operates as a material analogue to weathering, tracing how oppressive climates are lived, metabolized, and transmitted across generations. Distorted forms, porous edges, and shifting surfaces mirror the instability of weather itself, mapping patterns of erosion, improvisation, and adaptation across systems.
#AmandaRusshellWallace visualizes her ongoing research into the environmental, social, and economic impacts of the 1930s oil boom on Black families. Working as both researcher and subject, she activates her family cemetery in Tatum, Texas as a site for tracing “biological weathering” within her lineage. Layering photographs and narratives from her family’s medical archives with images of oil infrastructure, Wallace reveals chronic illness and trauma as embodied legacies of extraction and structural inequality.
@fidelis_studio examines the borderlands between wealth and poverty, freedom and confinement in Nigeria, tracing disparities between the country’s North and South shaped by British colonial extraction, uneven development, and unequal access to resources. Inspired by Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra (1973), he questions whose stories enter the historical record. In Stephen (2024) and Detention Series 1 (2023), obscured figures visualize trauma accumulating under systemic inequality.
@cease.and.perish ’s biomorphic, hand-crocheted sculptures explore borderlands between feminist infrastructures of care and institutional systems that shape inequitable health outcomes. In ascension model for gauze web I (2024), she stitches disparate elements into tales of vulnerability, trauma and healing. Its porous membranes expose the fragility of human existence, and its scars bear witness to accumulated stress, like weathering itself.
