Plastiglomerates (2024-)

An emerging collaboration with ceramic sculptor Allison Burch .

After reading Nathaniel Rich’s Second Nature (2021), I was motivated to look harder at the line between human-made and the geologic record. Plastiglomerates are predicted to be one of the only records of humanity in a post-human world (alongside their nuclear friend, cesium-137). They further mark a seminal event in the geologic record as the first human-made “rocks” comprised of sedimentary grains, and other natural debris, held together by plastic.

A joint effort between pollution and the elements, plastiglomerates have become a point of fascination in both art and archival worlds since Kelly Jazvac’s Milan 2019 Triennale exhibition of readymade plastiglomerates. Marking the anthropocene, these “rocks” have been framed as beautiful and horrifying markers of our existence. There’s something about looking at art as a human and being able to think “look what people make! isn’t it wonderful?” We don’t want our plastiglomerates to receive the same wonder.

This project pushes back on the plastiglomerate-as-readymade by highlighting its artifical and toxic birth. To view horrifying things as beautiful is one thing; to allow their beauty as an art object to diminish necessary action is another. Allison and I will be working together to build “artificial” plastiglomerates that reveal their plastic, violent jettison into the geologic record. They will not be disguised as rocks or stand as a simulacra; these objects say “this is not normal” or perhaps, even more importantly “it’s not normal that these are normal.”

One of the initial brainstom-sketches of this series was to make molds, and subsequently pour plastiglomerates using cement and perler beads in the shape of “jumpers” from 9/11. The conceptual premise is witnessing suffering from a safe time + space, and wanting to preserve that suffering neatly, forever.

Pictured below, Allison’s recent sculptural body of work