Tallapoosa Work

The Tallapoosa from Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee

My Moore (Muskogee/Scots) ancestors lived near Moore’s Creek (now County Line Creek) which was across the river from Tuckabatchee. They are listed on the 1832 Creek census records of Thlakatchka & Okefuskee Echee Sehogee Town. I imagined the land as it was then, with open land, forests, streams, homes and fields. The pigment is clay collected from the roadside near Moore’s Creek (nowCounty Line Creek) where it had been brought in during road construction.

Acrylic and Tallapoosa County dirt on unstretched canvas, 2025.

What Kudzu Hides

I have long been fascinated with kudzu, the invasive plant brought into the South in the 20th century to stop erosion. I viewed it as obscurance, suffocation, and suppression. An artist friend said she viewed it as whiteness. Here, a kudzu vine basket created by an Alabama craftsperson sits above a late Mississippian bowl and arrowheads.

Found kudzu basket torched with map gas, artifacts from the private collection of the Gadsden Museum of Art, 2025.

Exemplar Tallapoosa Pitchers.

These pitchers are decorated with mishima depicting indigenous trails, the years of treaties between the US and the Muscogee nation, Muscogee town names with tears, the gridding of the land in 1785, and the word “Civilize”. They are part of the Tallapoosa meander of Braided Rivers.