Shed
2025
Mixed media: found objects in Walla Walla, WA, stained ceramic




The Shed was a structure standing in the backyard of the first house I lived in in Walla Walla, WA. This started as a project to clean out the Shed and use it as an exhibition space, but as a roommate and I cleaned it out of its storage, and dug into the ground to add stepping stones, we became attached to the personality of its materials. It occurred to us that it was too vivid of a structure to be a backdrop.

From there the goal of the project became deconstruction, a definitional Shedding. The Shed’s construction over 100 years ago boxed in its physical definition and foreclosed other possibilities of the wood, concrete, and metal. By creating different assemblages of found objects in Walla Walla made up of similar material, in varying states of wear, the possibility of the material opened, both in terms of the infinite prospect of the raw material, and what the worn constructions became together. Tree branches and rocks recall what the concrete and wood may have been before, throwing the temporality of the material into flux.  

Following the aesthetic lead of the worn interior of the Shed, the constructed assemblages exist as offshoots of the structure, becoming a construction without use value, a dancing tornado.







Shortly after this project, Whitman College bought the property as an investment, which forced us to find a new place to stay as they made the property maketable. The house was gutted and the Shed was bulldozed. Some of the stained ceramic remains buried in the ground, but the house is unrecognizable as a living space, turned instead into a shiny commodity, a profitable blank middleground. These photos are roughly what the Shed looked like in its final moments.  


Special thanks to Marion Mattson for helping create and document this project.