Wendover, Utah, is located in the Great Basin at the edge of the Lake Bonneville salt flats and is the former site of a WWII Air Force Base where Colonel Tibbets of Enola Gay and his crew prepared for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing missions. Long abandoned, the landscape of barracks, hangars, and Wendover infrastructure remains on the gypsum plains, slowly decaying in the harsh high desert environment.
In 2008, during a residency at The Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover Field Station, Sarah Cowles produced a series of Sumi ink drawings depicting the numerous material piles found around the air base and former barracks. They captured the angle of repose of deteriorating domestic structures as they transitioned from architecture to layered piles of material.
Wendover’s harsh climate, with hot, dry summers, cold, windy winters, and occasional “pile fires,” accelerates the decomposition of temporary structures. Ongoing demolition works around the air base add to the varied wasteland topography. The piles reveal the visceral result when the orderly architectural section collapses.
The studies reveal the alternating mineral and organic layers contained in settlements, and the new orders that result from gravity and decomposition. They fuel approaches to embedding the materials of cultural history in landscape sections.
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