A Rift is a Hole, is a Way Through, 2026 Blown and Silvered Glass, Cast Glass, Solid Worked Glass, Schist, Digital Print, Wool, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable
In A Rift is a Hole, is a Way Through, I explore paradoxes in the world-making practices of early America through the material realities of Benjamin Chew, his family and their home at Cliveden. Using material experiments and early photographic methods, the project reimagines the “holes” created through the Chew family’s house and property.
Benjamin Chew owned several properties, including thousands of acres across multiple states and nine plantations, with enslaved labor serving as the foundation of the family’s wealth. Chew also held influential roles in shaping early America, including serving as Secretary of the Boundary Commission for the William Penn family during the infamous Mason–Dixon boundary dispute. Like many of his cohort, Chew understood land as empty and open for colonial interpretation—a blank map ready to be inscribed upon.
This logic of inscription became strikingly visible during my first visit to Cliveden. The original window glass had been etched by people who lived in or visited the house: a self-portrait, names and dates, weather events, and a record of Anne Sofia Penn Chew’s wedding in 1898. The surrounding property is still viewed through these inscriptions, collapsing time and memory with the arrogant act of engraving onto the land.
Kathryn Yusoff describes how white settler families invented and continue to enforce extractive modalities, “from the theft of Indigenous land and its exhaustion to the deep time subsidies of fossil fuels.” In response, a large-format photograph documents the schist quarry site mined for the house’s construction and is installed in a now-boarded second-window.
Garnet—formed under intense heat and pressure within schist—acts as both material metaphor and alternate for the diamonds used to scratch Cliveden’s windows. Garnet, prevalent in the surrounding Philadelphia area, is often thought of as a gemstone but here it’s full of fissures making it dull and opaque – better served as an abrasive in the resource economy. For me, garnet (also my birthstone) embodies contradictions at the core of America’s founding history. I made garnet engraving tools to etch text and drawings into glass rondels, a historic window making technique. One engraving shown here reads the project’s title "A Rift is a Hole, Is a Way Through” which takes from Kathryn Yusoff’s idea that holes created through “white geology” and resource extraction shape built environments but might also function as portals to alternative ways of being in the world.
Photos Courtesy of Constance Mensh and the Artist