Come Undone: Mourning with Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins (1981)

In 1981, Black American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) erected three mounds in the coastal marshland near Brunswick, Georgia, entitling them Marsh Ruins. She constructed the five-feet tall, boulder-like forms with concrete and tabby—a material once used to build the foundations of local plantation buildings. The sculptures stand in tidal waters that partially submerge them, hastening their intended decay. These abstract “ruins” function as an obscure memorial. They suture the present-day geography to earlier moments. For instance, across a river lies Saint Simons Island, where, in 1803, seventy-five Ebo people refused lives of enslavement by walking into a creek where they drowned. Buchanan’s sculpture, I argue, laments the ongoing crisis of violence against Black and Indigenous people.

My talk focuses on how Buchanan uses historically laden materials and labor in order to mourn lives lost to state-condoned violence. Crucially, her artwork refuses the conventional narrative arc of memorialization, which emphasizes distinctions between the past and the present. Buchanan exhibits a fundamentally ambivalent posture toward memorialization that confronts the unfinished nature of slavery and colonialism. Simultaneously, she models mourning as an ongoing process. The Marsh Ruins come undone and in doing so, they intertwine the material and affective dimensions of mourning.