Hudson Valley Ghost Columns are a series of site-responsive structures built at sites around NY state that respond to the history of the Hudson Valley and are constructed from materials important to the region’s geological, social, and industrial past. Each structure is dry-stacked on site, and made as a unique, meditative response to its context.

Column 1, Collaborative Concepts Farm Project, Garrison, NY, 2017

Column 2, Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz, NY, 2018

Column 3, Art Lot, Brooklyn, NY, 2018-2019

Column 4, Wilderstein Historic Site, Rhinebeck, NY, 2019

Column 5, Theoretical Archeology Conference, Syracuse, NY, 2019

Column 6, Fullerton Center for Culture and History, Terrain Biennial, 2019

Column 7, PS21 (Performance Spaces for the 21st Century), Pathways: Blazing Trails to a Sustainable Future, Chatham, NY, Summer-2020-Spring 2024

Column 8, Basilica Hudson, Hudson, NY, 2022-ongoing

Historic Hudson Valley-made bricks and unprocessed Cormo sheep wool from a Hudson Valley fiber farm.

Dimensions vary between 72” high, 32” diameter to 76” high, 36” diameter

The Hudson Valley Ghost Columns are a series of site-responsive columns built at a scale between body and architecture at sites around New York State. They are made from dry-stacked historic Hudson Valley bricks and unprocessed Cormo sheep wool sourced from an historic Hudson Valley fiber farm. The Ghost Columns echo the Hudson Valley’s industrial history and architectural ruins, formalizing traces of the region’s geological, social, and material history. The set of bricks comprising each Column were produced at a single brickyard, and the form of each Column is informed by the site. The works are constructed on-site and deconstructed at the conclusion of an exhibition. Columns 7 stood on site for 3.5 years, until some one dismantled it and took the bricks. Column 8 was commissioned “for the life of the sculpture”. Each structure is a unique, meditative response to its context.

The constructions are inspired by ruins found throughout the Hudson Valley landscape whose stone and brick fireplaces, wells, facades, and chimneys have survived the destruction of their surrounding architecture. They include vestiges of the Hudson Valley brick industry, which shaped the Hudson Valley and the boom of 19th-century construction in New York City.

Embodied in the materials and form of the sculpture are a range of entangled natural processes and human narratives spanning geological time, human lifetimes and generations, and cycles and seasons of sheep-wool growth and shearing. These narratives evoke the complicated relationship between humans and domesticated animals; the social history of labor, immigration, and invention that characterizes the Hudson Valley brick industry; and the particular stories and characters of each of the brickyards that produced the bricks comprising the columns, including LAHEY (William Lahey), Hutton (George Hutton, The Hutton Co.), JMC (Jova Manufacturing Company,) and FITZ-G (James Fitzgerald).

As both material trace and construction, the Hudson Valley Ghost Columns aim to allow the materials to act as agents, recalling multiple interwoven histories while becoming something other, a form evoking architecture, animal, and body simultaneously.

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 7/PS21 Pathways

Alison process 1.jpg

prev / next

Back to Hudson Valley Ghost Columns

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 1/Farm

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 2 /Time Travelers

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 3/Art Lot

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 4/ Wilderstein

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 6/Terrain

Hudson Valley Ghost Column 7/PS21 Pathways