Hole in the Sky (2025)
12-piece series
UV Print, Repurposed Vinyl Billboard
(#1, #4-12 46 x 36 in.) (#2, #3 in series 80 x 62 in.)
Editions of 2 +1 AP
Hole in the Sky, is an archive of community and loss in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.
The cyclical nature of hurricanes is a known weather pattern throughout the Caribbean archipelago. There has long been the expectation of a next storm, past the horizon. However, warming Atlantic Ocean temperatures promise more violent hurricanes, which gather momentum faster and occur in greater frequency. In 2019, when Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Abaco Islands, a small chain of out-islands in the Bahamas, it was a precursor to severe, climate-crisis-influenced hurricanes.
The Abacos have been a home for generations. Grandparents and parents weathered many hurricanes. Nevertheless, Dorian was different. The storm strengthened considerably as it approached, leaving no time to evacuate, even to nearby shelters. Then everything went silent. For days, the islands were torn by wind and buried under the sea.
I spent endless hours on local, private Facebook groups reaching out and searching for information among lists of survivors. As headlines passed, thousands of us continued to look for answers. I began to screenshot what I saw online to keep a record -should it be of value to someone looking for a loved one. Ultimately, it was not until four days after we lost contact with my mother that we learned she had survived.
Many passed away. Many washed away. The stories of those who remain are harrowing. In the years since, what began as the rebuilding of the Abacos became the displacement and loss of community.
Much later, I recognized that my archive from Dorian was an intimate record of found imagery, only accessible through lived experience. In considering the legibility of an image and how circumstance can inform evidence of occurrence, I came across the idea of treating the imagery with seawater.
By using dye-based inks to print the archive as mirrored images and then soaking them in seawater from the Abacos, the resulting images, visible through the backside of the paper, offer an anonymous yet personal look at the wake of climate disasters on local communities.
These obscured images are then reprinted onto a material familiar to sites of climate crises, the back of re-purposed, vinyl billboards. Often used for temporary repairs after natural disasters, these make consumerism and the pressures responsible for the climate crisis hauntingly visible in remote regions, such as the Abacos, which bear the burden and consequences of change.
-Quinn Matthews
The cyclical nature of hurricanes is a known weather pattern throughout the Caribbean archipelago. There has long been the expectation of a next storm, past the horizon. However, warming Atlantic Ocean temperatures promise more violent hurricanes, which gather momentum faster and occur in greater frequency. In 2019, when Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Abaco Islands, a small chain of out-islands in the Bahamas, it was a precursor to severe, climate-crisis-influenced hurricanes.
The Abacos have been a home for generations. Grandparents and parents weathered many hurricanes. Nevertheless, Dorian was different. The storm strengthened considerably as it approached, leaving no time to evacuate, even to nearby shelters. Then everything went silent. For days, the islands were torn by wind and buried under the sea.
I spent endless hours on local, private Facebook groups reaching out and searching for information among lists of survivors. As headlines passed, thousands of us continued to look for answers. I began to screenshot what I saw online to keep a record -should it be of value to someone looking for a loved one. Ultimately, it was not until four days after we lost contact with my mother that we learned she had survived.
Many passed away. Many washed away. The stories of those who remain are harrowing. In the years since, what began as the rebuilding of the Abacos became the displacement and loss of community.
Much later, I recognized that my archive from Dorian was an intimate record of found imagery, only accessible through lived experience. In considering the legibility of an image and how circumstance can inform evidence of occurrence, I came across the idea of treating the imagery with seawater.
By using dye-based inks to print the archive as mirrored images and then soaking them in seawater from the Abacos, the resulting images, visible through the backside of the paper, offer an anonymous yet personal look at the wake of climate disasters on local communities.
These obscured images are then reprinted onto a material familiar to sites of climate crises, the back of re-purposed, vinyl billboards. Often used for temporary repairs after natural disasters, these make consumerism and the pressures responsible for the climate crisis hauntingly visible in remote regions, such as the Abacos, which bear the burden and consequences of change.
-Quinn Matthews