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After The Highest Tide, Let the Earth Hold You


*content warning: hurricanes and flooding

The autumn of 2024 was situated within a moment of heightened awareness to hurricanes. The American Southeast was struck by five landfall hurricanes, four of them major, two of them affecting many of the same populations and only weeks apart. This season was, “One of the deadliest and most costly hurricane seasons ever seen in the Atlantic.”1 When a specific type of tragedy strikes, it recalls all of the tragedies of the past which fit into its category. The hurricanes of 2024 made palpable the hurricanes of 2017, 2012, 2005. Katrina and Sandy and Harvey reappear to join Helene and Milton in reminding us of the fragility of our existence.

Hurricanes repeat in the world like a mantra in the mind, and artist Delcy Morelos meditated on the destruction they cause well before the 2024 hurricane season took its toll. The Columbian artist shared that experience in the form of two large earth based art installations in New York City.
The door to Delcy Morelos’s Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven) at Dia Chelsea led into a large warehouse space with vaulted ceilings. The space was darkened. Skylights let in some light, but some were covered from above with a textured darkness. The walls were painted to mid-torso height with a thick, smooth, dark brown mud. The floors were painted, too, with a thick, slightly textured, dark brown mud. The air had an aroma of earthy, herby stagnation. It was a warm scent, at once calming and invigorating. Upon the mudded floor were stacks and rows of objects. Balls of mud the sizes and shapes of rabbit droppings, various bullets, oyster shells; all abstract and unknowable yet also deeply familiar. There were stacks of boards, like flooring or fence lumber, all made from or coated in the same smooth yet textured, dark, warm, mud. Piles of the mud, dried to dirt and crumbling, spilled from the walls and over boards into small piles. The deeper the room went, the darker it became. Viewers could walk half way into the darkness before the clear concrete path met a straight, clean edge of mud and was overcome, sucked in, settled down. From there, eyes would have to strain to see the back wall and the expanse of mud between it and the end of the path.
Morelos conceived of Cielo terrenal in the process of thinking about flooding. The mud used in the work comes from the Hudson River Valley and the height of the mud painted on the wall is the same as the high water mark of the flooding that happened in that area after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The mud on the walls recalled the moment of stillness that comes after shock, before the mind begins to react with reason.

In her book The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard writes of her house flooding, “It seemed primordial, as if the whole house had just been raised from the river bed, or as if the waters had only just retired from the earth.”2 As in the mountains of North Carolina in 2024, this strange encounter with the underside of water is newly and unexpectedly coming to many people. The unprecedented flooding marks a recollection point for future history.

Morelos’s work brought the immensity of that experience to viewers who have yet been so lucky as to avoid such a catastrophic invasion. The aftermath of the artist’s flood was calm, seemingly innocuous, as viewers encountered the tidy stacks of debris. Walking through the dark, things didn't make sense and clarity did not come with time spent. The unsettling uncertainty of how to proceed from devastation began to seep in.

This lack of answers, the lack of control that a human feels in the face of a climate come undone, surfaces throughout Elizabeth Rush’s book Rising, Dispatches from the New American Shore, which chronicles the flooding of communities as sea levels rise. Rush shows the tension between feeling held by a specific piece of land, loving it so deeply that you would die to stay with it, and knowing that you will instead have to leave it, as the sea swallows it up. She interviews Chris Brunet, a member of a community who has decided to relocate together, off their disappearing island, with help from a government grant. “Those of us out here are so tied into the Isle de Jean Charles. It’s all we have known for the last eight generations. I spend most of my time right here. You know I am Choctaw, Native American. For us moving is not just about getting up and making a career move. We’re actually leaving the place where we belong.”3 The second half of Morelos’s exhibition carried viewers into a similar double bind of conflicting love and discomfort.

 Above the high water mark rests dry ground. On a hill in the sun, the dirt is unfamiliar with the sensation of a flood. Out of the dark room of
Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven) and into the slightly brighter, but still dim, warm glow of El abrazo (The Embrace), viewers found themselves
approaching a sense of higher ground. The entire space, very nearly, from 8 inches above the floor to a couple of feet below the high, also
vaulted ceilings, was filled with a monolithic mound of mud and dried grass. Infinite small clumps of mud built up into a high, flat-topped
pyramid, the surface emitting singular strands of grass gone to seed. 

Walking around the walls of the mound would lead eventually to a space where the one mound was beginning to split into two, converging at the center of its mass from two diagonal walls. Walking into the center of this earthen V felt as if the walls were slowly closing in without moving or changing other than by relative position. At the center point, where a body would become too wide to continue without making contact, the closeness of the space could be felt against ear drums as the soil absorbed all sound. A true physical sensation of sound held at bay. A body engulfed, surrounded and held by mud and grasses gone to seed. El abrazo, the big hug, gestured toward a stifling absorption into the earth.This sensation that emanates from the work is represented in the artist’s own words when she says, "In Andean ancestral traditions, the human being is living earth, I am a body, I am earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the center and mirror of what we are." 4


1 Greg Allen, “The 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season Was the Deadliest in Nearly Two Decades,” NPR,
  https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5205099/2024-atlantic-hurricane-season-ends.

2 Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).

3 Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018).

4 Marian Goodman Gallery, “Delcy Morelos,” accessed October 31, 2024,
  https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/394-delcy-morelos/.

©Copyright 2024 Charli Beck