The images and text of Impermanent Lines are extracted from the original installation of Put Your Best Foot Forward and Take Two Steps Back, located with the Recurrent body of work. It was created while Maciuba was living in Lawrence, Kansas, and exploring the Flint Hills and tallgrass prairies of northeast Kansas for the first time. In preparation for an exhibition at the Great Plains Art Museum, Maciuba returned to the unfinished prints from the installation that specifically referenced Kansas and redeveloped them into the artist’s book you see here in 2025.

The original print installation intended to question how human activity influences and attempts to change, destroy, and re-create natural environments, particularly in light of human-caused climate change. However, the reassembly into Impermanent Lines eight years later as an artist’s book has created space for Maciuba to reevaluate how the work is conceptualized and engaged with. Ongoing research, un/learning, and reflection has led Maciuba to a realization of how vitally important it is to acknowledge the original inhabitants of the Flint Hills of Kansas and to a clearer understanding of what kinds of land relations (capitalism and colonialism) lead to human-induced environmental destruction. While the original work was only intended to consider the movement and destruction of habitats for native plants and animals, the use of land for settler capitalist purposes also requires the removal and displacement of Indigenous populations, including those that still reside in the area today and who continue to struggle against expropriation and environmental harm. It is impossible to discuss human impacts on the environment and landscape of the Great Plains without acknowledging and centering our own complicity in its alteration and without attending to the additional environmental injustice of forcible removal of Indigenous peoples from unceded lands in the United States.

Amanda Maciuba

Amanda Maciuba