A Beautiful, Depressing Exhibit

Murky Mirror at the Galveston Arts Center

A cob house is a house made of “cob”, an ancient English building material made of clay, sand, and straw. Adobe is a type of cob. It figures into Sarah Welch and James Beard’s exhibit Murky Mirror on view at the Galveston Arts Center and in her comics zine, Outpost, published in 2021. A Cob house is a very ecological structure—it’s walls help keep the insides at a comfortable temperature and the materials to build it don’t put much strain on natural resources. And they are durable. The main character in Outpost (her name is Victoria, but that is never mentioned in the comic) and her now-absent companion, Jess, built a cob house after leaving the city “before things got really bad.” They built a garden capable of supplying food for three (the third is a child only identified as “B”), but two bad years (drought one year and too much rain the next) forced Jess and B on the road. The main character remains behind to attempt to rebuild.