Скачать или смотреть Visiting Artist Talk: Carlie Trosclair at Herron

On September 17th, 2025, Herron School of Art + Design welcomed Carlie Trosclair to speak in the Basile Auditorium. The event was hosted by M Pofahl, Director of the Herron Galleries, and featured an engaging lecture that connected personal history with larger questions of memory, resilience, and place.

In her lecture, Trosclair invited viewers into her creative world, beginning with memories of growing up in New Orleans. As the daughter of an electrician, she spent much of her childhood inside historic homes under renovation. That early exposure shaped her practice, where she now uses latex as an “architectural skin” to create sculptural installations that preserve the essence of home and memory. Audiences saw images of works like porch casts and room impressions that embody these ideas.

Trosclair drew on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space to frame architecture as an extension of the human body, noting how doorways and chairs reflect physical form. She also reflected on Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory, where flooding in New Orleans becomes “water remembering its path.” This concept informs her latex casts of tree bark and cypress knees, highlighting nature’s persistence and resilience.

Themes of vulnerability and endurance threaded through the evening. Trosclair spoke about post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, where porches became gathering places even after homes were destroyed. She connected this to her ongoing exploration of how environments hold memory across time.

The night closed with a lively Q&A, where she encouraged students to embrace vulnerability, cultivate diverse skill sets, and even shared her humorous method of rolling up fragile latex casts “like burritos” for storage. Her talk wove together personal history with universal questions about place, time, and the interplay between nature and architecture.



This Visiting Artist Talk was part of Herron’s ongoing series that brings nationally recognized artists to campus to share their practice and ideas. Trosclair’s lecture left the audience with a deeper awareness of how art can preserve memory, challenge stability, and reimagine the spaces we call home.