Ledia Carroll is a an artist living in Austin, TX. She received her MFA from University of Texas at Austin and her BA in Linguistics from Wellesley College. Her drawings and environmental installations often deal with vanished geological history, topography, water, the measure of level, and how it is superimposed by humans on the landscape.
Her solo show Mission Lake Project at Southern Exposure in San Francisco located and drew which a field chalk marker the actual boundaries of a lost, once navigable waterway. She also organized an alley cat bike race around the perimeter and created an exhibit of drawings and original geographic research in the gallery. Thinking of it as rebuilding, she installed a 10 ton sand dune inside the SFMOMA. A project at Arthouse in Austin imagined bringing a hillside indoors to show both the built and former topography, allowing people to be in the plan and the section, as well as in multiple places in time at once. She used a laser level at Creative Research Lab to draw extremely detailed lines on the floor to reveal a seemingly level floor as a complex un-level topography. She fabricated a steel human path right through a massive civic fountain. She built a series of indoor/outdoor fountains at Austin Museum of Art and Dallas Center for Contemporary Art as well as a number of outdoor works in snow and ice. Thinking about sea navigation she cut an oculus from the wall at at a nautical show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Most recently she collaborated with two landscape architects on a white paper for the Port of San Francisco about how tidal pools and swimming ponds could and should be integrated into the interstices of the soon to be rebuilt Seawall. She also spent 10 years building art rafts and creating public performances w overlapping collaborators under the banners of art collective Miss Rockaway Armada, the Swimming Cities, and the Voyage of Hurlothrumbo. She is currently building a wind installation, researching the history of water crossings at a dam on the Colorado, and working on funding to bring back a local historic carnival. Research interests are mapping, celestial navigation and architecture, digital media, low tech, linguistics, design ethnography, and landscape history. Teaching roles have included undergraduates at the University of Texas as a TA in land art of the American west and for kids about aerial photography and topographic maps as a at San Francisco’s Zeum. A registered contractor, Carroll maintains a small independent landscape practice. Contact: lediacarroll (at) gmail (dot) com |