Architectural Skins

On an afternoon in the fall of 2021, New Orleans artist Carlie Trosclair walked out into Cobscook Bay, shuffling her waders through the shallow sludge at low tide, cursing—dragging a  full-scale latex casting of a porch behind her. The water would rise again, as high as twenty-four feet, by the afternoon. The shift of the bay’s remarkable tides had instantly struck Trosclair upon her arrival in Eastport, Maine—where she would complete an eight-week residency with the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. “How do y’all not flood?” she wondered, haunted by images of waterlogged houses in Pointe-au-Chien in the wake of Hurricane Ida, a disaster cleanup she’d only just finished lending her hand to.

She soon learned that Eastport’s waterfront structures are all built with recesses beneath the buildings, which accept the tide—taking the water in, then allowing it to flow back out. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, that is a real-life example of what it looks like to work with nature, within the architecture,’” she said. 

Dragging her most recent sculpture—cast from a building in nearby Eastport—into the Bay, her body recalled the exhaustive labor of rebuilding in that post-hurricane haze. “It’s almost like this stubbornness, to exist and stay alive—this inherent resistance to peril or something,” she explained. She set the sculpture up against the remnants of an old pier, and she waited, watching as it slowly buckled beneath the rising waters. “Of course, the image of this shell of space, engulfed in water over time—you know, of course subconsciously there is a layer of that disaster there.”  

Trosclair often speaks of her work in terms of layers, conceptually and materially folding in on itself, crinkling here and stretching there, ever peeling away, posed to unveil another layer, another idea. Recent years, shaped by a return to her hometown of New Orleans, have brought her to dissect influences deeply buried: how the city, and its architectural fragility, have innately shaped her journey as an artist—and particularly as an artist so preoccupied with the philosophy of structure, and its inevitable ruin. Of course, water—and its capacity for destruction—is an indelible part of that story. And for Trosclair, who was nineteen years old in 2005, so is Katrina. 

“The influence of growing up in New Orleans—none of that really came into the forefront until the last five years,” she said. “My dad is an electrician, and I grew up visiting him on different job sites. I got to be in homes frequently that were in the skeletal stage. I think that generated just an imaginative projection of space, through those experiences.” 

The draw of architecture as subject matter manifested early on, though; as a student at NOCCA, and then later while studying painting at Loyola, Trosclair would make extra money by selling custom pen-and-ink house portraits. “I would look at the blueprints my dad had laying around. And a lot of the time, the portraits were for the homeowners or contractors of the houses he would work on. So that was there, envisioning and dreaming about home.” 

When Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, Trosclair was a student at Loyola. “I was, you know, nineteen. I feel like I didn’t have a chance to process all of it.” She recalls being miles away from home, evacuated, sitting with her dad and trying to navigate an early version of Google Maps to see if they could find their house, to see if the roof was still there.

Around thirteen years later—most of which she had spent living away from New Orleans—this memory arose when she arrived in the city for a five-month residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in the Tremé in 2019.

“You know how you can go onto Google Maps and look at a home, and go back in time? I spent probably weeks walking through that neighborhood back in 2007,” she said. “And I felt these layers of time folding in on themselves. It was almost like I created this space where I mentally jumped back . . . It was really kind of overwhelming. I had never sat with Katrina through the lens of my art practice. It was the first time that I thought about the place that I was from, and the place that I grew up, in this lens of what had happened architecturally—which of course is a stand-in for what happened to people.” 

Despite this, a retrospective look at Trosclair’s body of work even prior to her Joan Mitchell residency reverberates with themes of infrastructural legacy, decay, and rebirth. “This was always a huge piece of it,” she says, thinking back. “But I had never before consciously factored it in.” While completing her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis from 2008–2010, she dove into the theoretical world of phenomenology and began incorporating meditations on the body into her studies of space and architecture. She referenced an anecdote from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space that considers how a bird builds its nest with its own body. “The physicality  of the bird’s body is what leaves the impression in the nest, and carves out the interior,” she said. “When I’m thinking about furniture and doorways and home, and just the tending of domestic spaces  . . . even when the body isn’t physically present, it’s present. Because everything that we’ve made within a home is made for the body, and to house the body.” 

After completing her degree, she remained in St. Louis, embarking on explorations of the city’s abandoned homes, which folded into yet another memory of the hurricane. “The first house I ever went into, it reminded me of what I saw looking into the window of my grandma’s house [in Waveland, Mississippi] after Katrina, and it just flooded me in a way that I didn’t expect … I didn’t expect to walk into an abandoned building in St. Louis, and that it would look like people just had to hurry up and leave. There were like handwritten notes discarded on the floor, things that are precious and sentimental just kind of left behind.”  

Overwhelmed by the elements of forgotten humanity, she turned instead to the materials  being broken down by nature and time. “All of these layers that had been covered up over time were now exposed and kind of unraveling to create these new patterns of design and beauty through that,” she said.

This exploration of dwellings and habitation, exposure to the elements and discarding, and the human body’s intimate relationships with space sustained Trosclair’s artistic practice for over a decade—culminating in ever-evolving studies presented as site-specific sculptural installations staged all across the country, but often within St. Louis’s abandoned buildings themselves, where she carved lacework designs into crumbling wallpaper and peeled back plaster just so, to reveal hints of the bricks laid behind it. “The term ‘architectural skin,’ was a part of my work really early on,” she said. 

The push and pull between domesticity and nature carried forth, and evolved, in Trosclair’s return to New Orleans in 2019. “How can we find ways to live with nature when nature is also destroying our homes?” she asks. “But at the same time, we built a city on a swamp, and of course continue mining natural resources … it’s almost laughable that we’re frustrated that our roads are cracked. We’re fighting against nature constantly.” 

This fight crystallizes where this phase of Trosclair’s work begins: in the space that—whether by human abandonment or nature’s force—is no longer of use to humans, and is thus taken over by nature. And then what remains? “It’s interesting because architecture provides almost an incubator of past lives, it is this middle marker between our short lives and the next,” she said. 

Still thinking about her work in terms of skins and layers, Trosclair in recent years has started working primarily with latex, creating phantom-like sculptural casts of everything from doorknobs to entire front porches. It started materially, in a search for something that would physically embody this idea of “architectural skin” while also being tactile and malleable enough to hold its own form. “Then, conceptually, it folded in really beautifully,” she said. A natural material traditionally used in architectural restoration work, latex is usually used as the intermediary to create a plaster cast. Trosclair turns this method upside down, using the latex instead as a sort of shedded shell—“like cicadas, or snakeskin”. “Latex holds this temporary moment of a surface or structure, and it kind of crystallizes that moment, not only in the imprint of what is physically present, but also by transferring actual particles. It kind of embeds that moment.” Latex also ages, she noted, acting as a living, temporary document  in and of itself, and drawing even more parallels to the human body and architecture. “It’s the impermanence of it, I think, that just reiterates it as an art object that is going to require my care and time and mending to keep it alive with me. Now we’re on this journey together, in the same way that you have to repair your roof sometimes or repaint your walls.” 

Her work these days is focused on pushing latex as a material as far as she can, carrying the concept to ever new, though always contiguous, places. In 2022, her installation Floodplain|uᴉɐldpoolℲ honed in on concepts of reflection, and on the relationships between past and present: a latex cast of a ceiling fan posed immaculately from its place above, doubled just beneath by a sagging, limp residual version of itself. The idea came to Trosclair while walking to her car, wearing galoshes, in New Orleans—noticing the rippled, broken reflections of the shotgun houses in the floodwaters after a short bit of rainfall. The installation was included in her exhibition as part of Houston’s Project Row Houses Southern Survey Biennial in 2022–2023, along with within|between, for which she cast  the entire interior of a room, then placed it inside the room—allowing viewers to walk in between the real wall and the ghost wall, which includes mirrors and objects removed from the real walls. “It’s kind of like this imprint, or imaginative kind of past or something—or future,” she said. “However you want to think about it.” This installation will be exhibited again at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi from August 17–December 13 as part of the Southern Arts exhibition of its State Fellows for the Visual Arts, before touring across the region in 2024. 

In the meantime, Trosclair is casting cypress knees. The concept started, as it so often does, with her thoughts on layers, and time, and water—and more recently, breath. “I’ve been thinking a lot about breathing when it comes to the body, a lot about inhaling and exhale,” she said. “And I didn’t even know when I started casting these, but there is a theory that cypress knees pop up out of the water to get air back down to the roots. An aeration system. Breath. It's almost like everything just subconsciously cycles back to itself.”