Carol LaFayette

Thirty years ago, futurists and technologists predicted that digital networks would save the planet. Cities would disappear, people would telecommute across prairies in pajamas, and trees would thrive again as paper became obsolete. Industry, they claimed, would levitate above the land, transacting in the atmosphere, leaving flora and fauna to resurrect.

Carol LaFayette’s lived experiences tell another story. She has seen a bluff above a California beach carved into with paved roads, charred cypress stumps in the Okefenokee Swamp, sludge on the Chattahoochee River, and a Florida shoreline where a nuclear power plant borders a gated resort. On the edge of Lake Ontario she strained to hear a single insect as pan-sized fish floated sideways and sank. Now, her studio-lab—40 acres in Texas—sits surrounded by “developments” that erase what they name (“Wolf Run,” “Ocelot Hollow”), bulldozers and fracking rigs pressing in on an island of fragile land battered by floods, drought, ice storms, and cyclones.

Inspired by James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, LaFayette explores how to make earth art with the smallest possible footprint. Her practice is informed by geophysics, entomology, and biology, with a focus on how flora and fauna adapt to disruption: manatees gathering near sewage plants, hawks nesting on balconies, seals sunning on docks, owls burrowing into storm drains. Their world, she notes, is more porous than ours.

While some companies imagine a “global nervous system” of smart dust, LaFayette creates a local nervous system—an experimental framework that reveals subtle interconnections among flora, fauna, and phenomena in her landscape. Her guiding principle is simple: whatever happens here is part of the art. The works that emerge serve as signals—small bonfires set out to attract passing vessels.