The Sky in Bigger than Texas

Caroline Ruffault

2024 — Saint-Malo, France

About this series

The Sky is Bigger in Texas, created during an artist residency in Marfa in November 2024, is a visual investigation into the disappearance of the landscape brought about by our dependence on the automobile and the ecological disasters it generates in the Permian Basin. The images unfolding through the car windshield evoke both the mythology of the road trip, the sweeping vistas of Hollywood cinema, and idealized visions of exploration. Yet behind these postcard-perfect landscapes lies a territory profoundly altered by oil wells, extraction sites, and roads carved through lands that were once preserved. By immersing her film negatives in produced water from shale oil extraction, Caroline Ruffault overlays the material reality of environmental destruction onto our imagined landscapes, revealing the hidden face of the territories we consume through images.

Photographer: Caroline Ruffault
Nationality: Texas, USA
Based in: French
Website:  www.carolineruffault.com
Instagram: @caroline.ruffault

After studying cinema and spending several years working in the audiovisual industry in Paris, Caroline Ruffault moved to Texas. It was in Austin that her photographic practice began to take shape. Back in France, she earned her DNSEP (Master of Fine Arts) in 2022.Her work explores liminal spaces, thresholds where worlds, elements, and living beings intertwine. Through photography, she seeks to make visible the subtle interactions between humans and their environments. Rooted in intimate narratives, her practice follows the threads that connect bodies to their surroundings, tracing the physical and mystical lines that bind us to one another and to the territories we inhabit. Oscillating between poetry and engagement, her work transforms landscapes into emotions that move through us, while an attachment to place becomes a way of questioning our relationship to identity, belonging, and territory.