"46 New Relationships" as installed in the Perlman teaching museum at Northfield College. This piece is from my recent focus on plastic foam that has found its way to the river, and become a part of the environment. I see this foam not as garbage but a natural material, a sign of our new anthropocene epoch. The riverbank reveals long-buried foam with tree roots running through it, or chew-marks on the surface. Until recently, humans assumed that styrofoam was not digestible by any living organism, but in 2015 a group of scientists announced that mealworms can eat and digest styrofoam. Maybe the natural world has been welcoming styrofoam for decades, and we just haven’t been paying attention.
