The tactile and visual sensations of a place can create an indelible impression. Through fragments of those sensations, memory reconstructs the essence of that impression. In Body-Earth Project, I have attempted to recreate fragments from my personal history, influenced by the midwestern landscape and rooted in the process of papermaking. "Boulder" sits on a hillside of native grasses on land that has been in my family for years. Its form evolved from oval shaped areas of flattened grasses, perhaps where deer bedded down at the intersection of their crisscrossing trails. Constructed of densely-layered newspaper and grocery bags, and carved with a chain saw, the form has been chewed into and torn by the animals and organisms that inhabit this place. Months of Kansas heat, rain, and snow have molded and rotted the paper, obscuring the actual substance and causing it to sink into the ground. Time has united it with the site; it now belongs to the hillside. About fifty yards away, "Parasite" connects a living tree and a dead one with a tangled, web-like structure of handmade straw paper rings. I used a combination of overbeaten abaca and cooked straw to create a fibrous, high-shrinkage pulp that dries taut and skin-like on wire structures. The crescent wire forms, made of steel wire and bound together with copper wire, serve as an armature for the pressed paper sheets, which I tore down into small pieces and adhered with methyl cellulose. The steel rusts due to the wet sheet, creating a bleeding effect which seeps through the paper along the wire edge. Beeswax, added for durability and transparency, transforms the straw paper to suggest the organic matter in the surrounding ochre fields. At a glance, among winter's bare branches, the web is quite subtle; when seen interwoven with summer's green leaves, it is curiously identifiable. The abandoned downtown lot which houses the other sculptures is across from Union Station in Kansas City and evokes a sense of both solitude and desolation. Protected on one side by a bridge and on others by a stone building facade and railroad tracks, this lot seemed an appropriate environment for the installation of "Growth" and "Body Roll." Also made of straw paper rings, "Growth" is an unexpected, creeping, vine structure, living in a blighted place. It climbs up the stone wall like a natural echo of the graffiti on the adjacent bridge. The physical process of making paper is essential to the ideas embodied in this project. The soaking and decomposing of straw to pulp, to build up again as paper layers, follows the natural cycle of growth and decay. The rusting wire armatures and tanned, hide-like paper surfaces age as exposure and the seasons continue the process of deterioration beyond the hands of the maker. Laid among broken glass and debris, "Body Roll" is a dense roll of grocery bags, newspaper, straw, earth, leaves, and beeswax. Through layering, an accumulation of substance, into strata, an expanse of geological time is suggested. As a residue of modern culture, the recycled, industrially-made papers alter the sense of time. As rain has seeped into the "cloth" of the grocery bags and as the beeswax has melted, the tight interlocking edges have curled, creating deep crevices in the surface, which has slowly given way. Observing and recording changes on monthly and sometimes weekly site visits, I have been intrigued by the evidence of human presence as makeshift homeless shelters have appeared near the urban site. No one vandalized the installation, until the landowner cleared the site. Somehow it seems appropriate that the pieces were torn down and pushed into a pile--along with abandoned crates, overgrown weeds, and debris--near the edge of the lot. The remains of the decomposed objects will be collected and exhibited with photographs recording the deterioration process, in a Kansas City gallery this summer.   Body-Earth Project is supported by a Regional Artists' Projects Grant, a partner program of the Artists' Projects Regional Initiative, which supports artists in the fourteen different regions across the fifty United States and Puerto Rico. The Regional Artists' Grant Program is administered by Randolph Street Gallery and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center and is supported by funds form the presenting and Commissioning Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support from the Illinois Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, and Randolph Street Gallery. The artist extends her thanks to Bryan and Wesley Gross and to Todd and Mary Miller for all their assistance on this project.