My interest in infrastructure was first piqued on a cross-country road trip from North Carolina to my new home in California. During a particularly flat stretch of 1-40 between Northern Texas and New Mexico, high-voltage transmission towers were one of the only regular sights on the horizon. I imagined them like giants traveling across a vast landscape alongside me. They were striking in contrast to the surrounding desert, tall and manufactured. They were anonymous and a little mysterious. I didn’t have a sense of where they were coming from or where they were going. But for a long time after that trip, the image of those towers silhouetted against rocky landscapes and vast skies has stuck with me, making its way into sketches and paintings. At the time, I was interested in the transmission towers as nothing more than a striking form.

This interest shifted once I realized that these electrical towers were not just benign scenery but could wreak havoc when not adequately maintained. In 2018, the Camp Fire was sparked by an unmaintained power line coming into contact with dry vegetation in Northern California. This fire caused 85 deaths, displaced over 50,000 people, and destroyed over 18,000 structures. This chain of events made me realize that transmission towers are not only essential infrastructure but also vulnerable. It made me aware of how inconceivably massive and interconnected the electrical grid is. I wanted to reconcile that this system is both completely ordinary and accessible to me at a human scale, as well as thousands of miles of electrical network.

This series reimagines the power grid in miniature—interconnected and self-contained—to address the construct of distance from the hyperobject that is the power grid.