Gust materialized out of the winds of West Texas. From my early childhood on an isolated cotton farm in Dell City, I have vivid memories of objects blowing across the fields, particularly my grandfather's Stetson Open Road hat. Woven in felt, every hat has a story and transports many conversations over the decades; these stories are shaped with memories and record beliefs... some eloquent, and some twisted. In generations past, in fable and in legend, hats sheltered spirits, veiled sorrows, represented people and their occupations, and defended against the elements. They are witnesses of varied pasts. When my grandfather passed, his hat landed on my coffee table.

To most artists, a Stetson is a stereotypical Texas symbol to be avoided. For me, using hats as a sculptural material unearthed my artistic voice and shaped my first environmental narrative. Cradled in my youthful memory, hats blew in strange, wonderful ways, spinning from a generation marked by my respect to balancing present responsibilities and fears. My innocence escaped the realization that the consuming wind was not a natural occurrence; it was, in fact, the result of the perfect storms of the 1930’s, the dirty '50s, the ‘70s, and the ‘80s dust bowls. Each storm inspired new government environmental policies and land management.

In 2017, I traveled to set my eyes on our old farm and experience the landscape of my youth. I saw vast, vacant fields of beige tilled with stillness, patched with acres of monocrops raised to feed animals in stockyards—it looked normal, but felt somehow wrong. Passively I noticed the cultivated rows were no longer on the same elevation as the dirt roads and cinder block house—the fields lay in recessed plots. Wind erosion, eighty plus years since Black Sunday—unimaginable. Visiting for Christmas in 2018, I heard my parents discuss the time they returned home to Dell City to find two feet of soil in the house, and the time my mother met an old rancher who remembered when the area was covered in grass as high as a horses’ belly. At 60 years of age, I realized for the first time that the wind which captured my childhood imagination and stole my grandfather’s hat was the dust bowl's lingering ghost: it was man-made. It was like a knock in the head, despite numerous “environmental” governmental agencies the industrial revolution has morphed into industrial agriculture practices. Food is grown as a commodity: the environmental impact and nutritional value are out-weighed by quantity and production time. This was not my first aha! moment concerning the status quo; I learned to question food production/marketing and modern medicine in 1996 when my husband became diabetic. In 2006, as a lone ranger in my beliefs on nutrition I committed to only eat grass-fed meat and organic whole foods. In 2013, a Ted Talk by Allan Savory linked my nutritional world to the desertification that left its imprint on my subconscious and gave new meaning to my work.

Gust (2020) consists of six cast bronze hats, each contorted by the winds of my imagination and the ill-conceived farming and governmental practices that prioritize the GNP before human nutrition and ecological function. The six hats represent the six principles of the regenerative agriculture revolution: eliminating tillage, maximizing crop biodiversity, keeping the soil covered, maintaining living roots year-round, integrating livestock to build soil microbes, and holistic management.

Gust arose in the desert and rests in Houston’s fields of green; these hats now witness the dawn of a new agro-environmental awareness.

**GUST—integrating livestock to build soil microbes**

**GUST—maintaining living roots year-round**

The variations are endless.

GUST