For decades, sculptor Jean Shin has made the saying “one man’s trash, another man’s treasure” into an artistic motto.
had planted it because he had witnessed the devastation of the hemlock trees by the tanning industry. I wanted to reckon with those two losses, of trees but also animals sacrificed to make these pelts.
My work really talks about trying to celebrate our unique shapes and sizes. It’s so unsustainable to have new fashion every season, so I love this idea of repairing clothes and mending them to fit our bodies better. That’s also healthier for our planet., where fashion designers donate their scraps and remnants, whether that’s Marc Jacobs or Chloé, or even upholstery leather. So they are in the waste stream of fashion.
I deconstructed the clothing. I was curious about how to generate a fashion pattern that would feel like a fragmented body within a collective mural made with laundry starch, with both cut outs and suspended pieces. It was like a mosaic or a collage of people’s identities that were reconstructed to fit a larger organization’s identity. In some way, they felt as if they were portraits of the museum employees.
The properties of plastic, how versatile it is, its clarity, its color—all of it really continues to amaze me. Plastic was such a major innovation when it was discovered. Unfortunately, now it’s being overused. It is so seductive, and so useful, but also so toxic and harmful to us. Consumer demand has allowed us to imagine that single-use plastics fulfill all our desires, and that they’re disposable, but they’re not. They collect somewhere.
I’m also questioning my own waste stream. I saved the ends of the plastic bottles and riveted them together to create these organic forms called [which are installed outdoors]. They appear like flora on a rock, but in fact, it is one of my plastic “invasive” versions, not the native species. So, it’s thinking about plastic pollution, but also about habitat loss.
We were aiming for like 10,000 phones. And we had miles of cables as well, creating this immersive landscape. To me it looks like a possible dystopia. This is the future if we don’t recycle. But many people got very nostalgic for their old phones, their flip phones, that first sense of mobility from these once innovative devices that really changed our lives—but they’re also changing our environment.