Rachel Eng — Compression / Recover

Clay remembers what we try to forget.

In Compression, Rachel Eng brings the earth inside, stacked, pressed, breathing. These bricks are not fired into permanence but held in a state of pause: enough to stand, not enough to forget where they came from. They are made from Cumberland County clay, dug from a housing development site, and shaped by hand. They carry the imprint of place, of labor, of interrupted ecosystems. They hold stillness, and they hold consequence.

Projected across their surface, the land flickers back into view. The sounds of wind, rust, and movement circle the space. There is no spectacle, no grand narration. Just a quiet unearthing of questions:
What do we take from the land, and what do we leave behind?
What stories do our materials carry before we even touch them?
What does it mean to build something that will be undone?

In Recover, Eng returns to the act of care: gathering what has broken, not to restore it to what it was, but to accompany it as it becomes something else. Her work resists permanence and purity. It asks us to see with humility, to make with attention, and to unmake with grace.

These installations do not demand understanding. They ask for presence. They ask us to be with what we don’t fully grasp, to dwell with forms in flux. Like the artists gathered in this special issue of The Pasticheur, Eng does not simplify her materials, or herself. She lets them shift. She lets them speak without explanation.

She reminds us that making can be a form of listening. That art, too, can kneel before the winds of others.

And that sometimes, the most radical gesture is to build something meant to disappear.