My practice involves the physical manifestation of interspecies intra-action and natural forms of contamination-as-collaboration.

  In order to flesh out these ideas, I will be drawing from feminist theorist Karen Barad in exploring the concept of lichenization, using the theory of intra-action to decentralize the human and refocus our understanding of relationship-based living. Concepts of contamination-as-collaboration will be based on work from philosopher Alexis Shotwell and anthropologist Anna Tsing. These concepts will provide a framework for understanding my approach to developing artwork. I will present these ideas and explain the importance of hybrid artistic methodologies that guide my artistic outcomes.

The exhibition title Rat, Plastic, Wood references American political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett. In her book Vibrant Matter, she lists items she found in a storm drain:

one large men’s black plastic work glove

one dense mat of oak pollen

one unblemished dead rat

one white plastic bottle cap

one smooth stick of wood (4)


These items struck her with the “excruciating complexity and intractability of non-human bodies” (4). In this list, three words resonated with my own experience of non-human bodies: rat, plastic, and wood. When combined, these words form an ingredient list for hybrid forms of matter. I relate each of these non-human bodies to the roles within a lichen. These three bodies expand within the exhibition and represent three forms of being: heterotrophic life, autotrophic life, and toxin-forming actants. When walking into the exhibition, the sterile gallery becomes a shell for a large permeable membrane of plastic and wood -- an undulating greenhouse that houses an experimental, relational habitat of microorganisms, plants, and trash. This is the culmination of my research and acts as a site of mutual investigation between the human and non-human.

Through my work, I seek to explore the potentials of repairing the rift between humans and non-humans through speculative, collaborative, and contaminated multidisciplinary artworks by cultivating potential for collaborative creative partnerships. As art writer Clare Bishop notes, participatory art interfaces with reality and can help in repairing social rifts (11). Although my work is not participatory in the traditional sense, it is participatory in that it allows space for active collaboration via contamination and growth. Nothing is inert, everything is potentialized. The collaborations are happening on a more-than-human level, while actively engaging with human-made detritus. In order to repair a rift, it is important to understand how it was formed in order to un-form, which can occur through cross-species processes of decomposition and metabolization. The dichotomy between human and non-human actants has been artificially imposed and amplified by capitalism and the effects of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. These movements enshrined individualist ways of thinking that are toxic and difficult to undo, resulting in our current compromised times of racism, sexism, and ecological destruction (Shotwell 8). Through processes of othering, we act against the fact that we are not only a part of nature, but are constituted by millions of microorganisms. Dr. Lynn Margulis initially coined this symbiosis between microorganisms and hosts as a holobiont in her 1991 book Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. As holobionts, we are not one thing, but many. As humans, we have become not only separated from nature, but also from ourselves. As a result, capitalism has defined our epoch, putting us on a trajectory towards mass multi-species extinction.

Extracting ourselves from capitalism is a task that often feels impossible. It is the force that shifted Western society into operating as individualist rat kings instead of rats. Capitalism is the current primary driver to the forces of the human world. We know from Julius Robert Mayer’s First Law of Thermodynamics that energy never disappears and always transforms into something else – it cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. Perhaps capitalism cannot be destroyed, but it can be metabolized.︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎🕳️