The lie of the bayou

As she lay dying. Processed and hundspun Spanish moss. 18 in x 20 ft x 5 in; 2025-ongoing.

Claudia Moreno

UH Annual Thesis Show, April - May 2025, Blaffer Museum

Born in New Orleans and based in Houston, artist Roslyn Dupré examines racial ambiguity, place-making and inherited memory by working primarily with fiber, found objects, and hand-built tools. Her sculptural and textile-based works explore the intersection of personal and regional history through material transformation. 

Dupré employs fermented, hand-spun Spanish moss as a material historically processed for upholstery stuffing. Reclaiming this fiber, Dupré reshapes it into sculptural forms, aligning with her broader practice of reworking materials into new states. “There is something of my own blood in it,” the artist states, underscoring the personal significance of this transformation. 

In another work, Dupré's Word maps series integrates graphite, thread, and machine-sewn text drawn from private conversations and official documents. The shapes of words determine the contours of these abstracted maps, tracing histories shaped by displacement and disaster in the wake of annual storm cycles. These works reference language as both record and distortion, linking geographic and textual mapping. Satellite imagery from NASA’s Earth Observatory appears throughout, situating local climate events within planetary cycles and framing environmental instability as both personal and systemic.

Dupré’s work is deeply engaged with place, particularly the layered identity of New Orleans, a city often positioned between American and extra-American cultural definitions. Through material choices and fabrication processes that emphasize transformation and reinterpretation, her work asks viewers to consider how materials, histories, and identities evolve—what is preserved, what is lost, and what is remade. 

Roslyn Dupré will receive an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston in Spring 2025.