As the first artists-in-residence for the East Jemez Landscape Futures Project, Kathleen Brennan and I created The Edge Effect: re-Imagining the East Jemez Landscape, a site-specific, place-based installation inside the historic fire lookout at Bandelier National Monument. This collaborative restoration project is spread across various watersheds and includes many land management entities: Bandelier National Monument and the Valles Caldera National Preserve, Santa Fe National Forest, Santa Clara Pueblo, Cochiti Pueblo, San Ildefonso Pueblo, Jemez Los Alamos County, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and various other stakeholders in the area.

Communities across this landscape have faced unprecedented landscape changes due to severe drought through climate change and catastrophic wildfires. Coordinated efforts are needed to help steer imaginative and novel approaches about how to manage and heal these impacted landscapes. The Edge Effect focused on the historical boundaries that have fractured the East Jemez landscape and thus fracturing the human community as a whole. Our installation was simplified, pared down, and abstracted into lines. Lines symbolizing the boundaries that have fractured the landscape, but lines that bind our seperate cultures to that land.