New Orleans artist Hannah Chalew imagines a postapocalyptic Louisiana through reclaimed oil wells

Hannah Chalew salvaged an old oil well from the Poland Avenue scrap yard in New Orleans. She coated it with bagasse, or sugar cane pulp, from Grow Dat, the urban farm in City Park. The paint is recycled, from another nonprofit, the Green Project, and the plants — palmettos, cypress, elephant ear — are largely from the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana’s greenhouse. 

The embedded plastic trash — a toothbrush, a COVID-19 test, an old burned CD — “came from my life,” she said. “Plastic will be a fossil marker of our time, here long after we’re gone.” 

The result is an artwork that gestures at what humans might leave behind, a sculpture called “Orphan Well Gamma Garden.” It’s a window into the post-apocalypse, where the stuff of civilization has coagulated around Chalew’s reclaimed steel wellheads, that questions the kind of future that humans are creating, and what might survive us. 

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“I felt kind of like a reverse archaeologist, imagining how some person in the distant future would think about this, like, disembodied sippy-cup top,” Chalew said. “What will the people, or the creatures, who encounter this make of it?” 

That work turned out to be only the first in a series of orphan-oil-well-inspired work. A new piece, “Christmas Tree” — named after the Christmas Tree wellheads that pockmark Louisiana’s coastline and are so called because they taper somewhat like a tree — was inspired by a June trip to the mouth of the Mississippi River. There, Chalew saw wells that had become “orphaned.” The companies that owned them had gone bankrupt and responsibility for plugging them had fallen to the state. Some were leaking oil.

She wonders, too, what kind of plant life might recolonize old wells. She embedded “Christmas Tree” with oak wood and resurrection fern — a plant that can dry out and enter into a desiccated, dormant state, and remain that way for up to a century. When exposed to water, the fern comes back to life. 

She said she wanted to imagine “what might recolonize” old, abandoned fossil-fuel infrastructure. 

Chalew’s “Christmas Tree” was just on display at Good Children Gallery part of a show called “Mining for Wonder in the Humdrum.” The show closes Dec. 7. She has work on display as part of another exhibition, called “Fragile Matter,” at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette. 

“I realized that this is a body of work,” she said. “These totemic sculptures are part of an eventual show that will be a kind of ‘orphanage’ of old well sculptures.” 

‘You don’t need to worry about the radon’

The ‘gamma garden’ in the title is an allusion to the post-World War II, U.S.-led initiative called Atoms for Peace, which sought to find peaceful uses for nuclear technology. The idea was to speed evolution in plants by planting them around a pole made of radioactive metal. (Most of the plants died.)

Chalew named her work after this practice because old oil wells can themselves be radioactive, which she learned as she was building the sculpture. She called up a friend who works at an environmental advocacy group, who told her, “You don’t need to worry about the radon. You need to worry about the benzene,” another carcinogenic chemical that can waft off oil wells. 

She tested her wells for both and found them to be free of radiation and toxins. 

The legacy of the petrochemical industry has been the focus of Chalew’s work. In one of her recent paintings, “Feedback LOOP,” now on display at the Hilliard, Chalew paints plants as intertwined — as they often are in south Louisiana — with industrial pipes and valves. 

An oak tree, downed in Hurricane Ida, almost appears to be fighting against the pipes that make up LOOP, an offshore oil hub connected to pipelines that weave their way through Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. As with her orphan well sculptures, the materials are natural or salvaged, with ink made from oak trees and paper made from sugar cane and used plastic. 

Her critique extends further, calling out industry’s affiliation with the arts.  

She emblazoned the words “HELIS OIL + GAS” on each of the wells, a reference to the one-time Louisiana oil and gas company, which, through its charitable foundation, is a major patron of the arts in Louisiana. By centering this particular well in her work, she is critiquing how the arts in New Orleans are funded. She’s refused funding from grant-making institutions that are linked to the oil and gas industry, she says, and won’t accept support from Helis. 

She also logged the carbon footprint of producing and transporting the sculpture at 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide, which she’s tried to offset by planting cypress trees. She considers this a challenge to other artists to consider the environmental impact of their work. 

“I want to create these visions that are beautiful, but then as you explore them, sort of unsettling,” she said. “Is this the future we want our descendants to inherit?”