Caroline Ruffault
France
Caroline Ruault studied film and worked for several years in the audiovisual field in Paris before moving to Texas. In Austin, her photographic practice began to take shape. She graduated in 2022 with a DNSEP Art degree from the Beaux-Arts de Lorient, affirming her singular path. Today, she lives and works between Saint-Malo and Rennes. Her work explores liminal spaces, the subtle exchanges between humans and their environment, weaving photography, paper weaving, and embroidery into a practice that bridges the visible and the invisible.
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The Sky is Bigger in Texas
The Sky is Bigger in Texas is a visual research project exploring the disappearance of landscapes linked to car culture and the ecological disasters caused by oil and gas extraction in the Permian Basin, northern Texas.
From Houston to Marfa, I quickly realized that here the body doesn’t walk — it drives. The car became the true subject: a filter through which the body experiences the landscape. My project seeks the tension between the mythology of the American road trip, the vast beauty of Big Bend National Park, and the destruction caused by fracking and abandoned oil wells.
Through ranchers like Schuyler Wright, whose family land has been scarred by toxic lakes from poorly sealed wells, I discovered the human stories behind this ecological crisis. Texas has more than 780,000 wells, thousands of them abandoned and leaking contaminated water — an issue ranchers are fighting to bring into legislation.
Between toxic wastelands and grand desert vistas, the project reflects on the paradox of Texas: a land of mythic horizons, but also a territory deeply marked by the hidden costs of its petroleum wealth.
