Ground Current

Ground Current brings a fragment of electrical infrastructure from its distant position within the landscape down to the viewer’s level. At its center are high-voltage glass insulators, objects typically suspended along transmission lines more than 100 feet in the air. Removed from their utilitarian context, these industrial components are seen for their aesthetic qualities and repurposed as water reservoirs for pollinating insects.

The work places this infrastructure in dialogue with living ecological processes. Pollinator-supporting plants grow through and around the galvanized steel structure, gradually transforming its appearance over the course of the season. As flowers bloom and attract wildlife, objects designed to regulate the movement of electrical energy begin to support a different kind of circulation through pollination, nourishment, and habitat. The sculpture creates a meeting point between engineered systems and biological networks, emphasizing their shared dependence on flows, connections, and exchange.

Ground Current reflects on a moment when expanding technological demands place increasing pressure on land and ecological systems. The electrical grid often appears abstract and immaterial, yet it remains inseparable from the landscapes that sustain it. By embedding fragments of energy infrastructure within a living environment, the work asks what more reciprocal relationships between technology and ecology might look like. It invites viewers to consider the visible and invisible currents that shape everyday life and to imagine futures in which human infrastructure is designed to support the environment upon which it depends.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.