allowed our edges to merge (2024)
Growing up on the Gulf South, my childhood was impacted by cycles of flooding, hurricane evacuation, loss, and uncertain return. Reflexively, my work explores the ephemerality of home and its relationship to the natural world. I look to regenerative cycles found in nature to reflect on the symbiosis of domestic and ecological systems. Themes of memory, loss, and renewal emerge through a collective telling of architectural and environmental histories. In Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” she describes floods as water’s remembrance of where it used to be. “All water has a perfect memory,” she writes, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” A flood is water’s reclamation.
In allowed our edges to merge, 2024, latex casts of cypress knees emerge from a brick wall of Trosclair’s childhood home. Cypress trees thrive in wet environments, with “knees” that exchange oxygen to stabilize in waterlogged soils. Here, the cast cypress knees are specific to residential suburban communities, where “knees” are commonly exterminated to manicure lawns. Despite this erasure, the gnarled roots return year after year, because they blindly remember a time when the area was subaquatic. In casting the roots and meditating on this cyclical pattern, I’m reminded of the equilibrium of breath, how inhale leads to exhale, collapse leads to expansion, and on and on. How do we create cycles of reciprocity and cohabitation that are adaptive, not extractive, within the living landscape?
drifter (2026)
Inspired by historic floating houses, holdfasts of marine life, and rising tides, drifter, 2026, explores longing and transience on the tri-coastal peninsula of Cape Cod. By splicing and fusing a variety of mouldmaking processes, household ephemera morphs into nautical rope, a wooden dune shack hovers between presence and absence, and seashell debris shapeshift into home relics. On the threshold where water meets land, how do we adapt? What can we learn from the ebb and flow of the tides?
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Artist Bio
Carlie Trosclair (b. New Orleans, Louisiana, United States) is an installation artist who uses latex to record and reimagine the genealogy of home and its relationship to the natural world. Trosclair earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and a BFA from Loyola University, New Orleans. Artist residencies include: La Napoule Art Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Loghaven, McColl Center, Joan Mitchell Center, and the Santa Fe Art Institute Changing Climate Residency. Trosclair’s work has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, and Artscope, among others. She has exhibited at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Ogden Museum, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Bradbury Art Museum, the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and DeLand Museum of Art. In 2024, Trosclair received the Ellis-Beauregard Fellowship for the Visual Arts, and was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Art Research Grant. She is currently a 2025-2026 Visual Artist Fellow at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Website: www.carlietrosclair.com | Instagram: @carlietrosclairstudio
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