Series

Cement Frescoes, 2023-ongoing

shown at Canopy Projects , Austin, TX

I cast single-use plastic food packaging in cement, turning disposable containers into relief surfaces for hand-painted portraits of wild plants often dismissed as weeds. The panels preserve the ribs, cavities, and stamped commands of consumer packaging while carrying images of stubborn living forms. Through this collision of industrial residue and botanical attention, the work considers how convenience culture estranges us from the more-than-human world.

The series proposes a counter-archive of the Anthropocene, where supports may outlast the fragile records they carry. Forms born from throwaway packaging become long-lived substrates, while the painted plants upon them remain vulnerable to fading, abrasion, and loss. In this reversal, industrial matter threatens to endure longer than the ecologies it helped diminish. The panels ask what future generations may inherit: living habitats, damaged remnants, or records whose meanings can no longer be read.

The works are often arranged as vertical systems that move from an unstable, abstract origin into increasingly specific forms of classification. Botanical images establish an initial field of specimens, expanding to include ecological relationships such as pollination, then folding inward to trace variation within a single species and compress lifecycle and lineage into grouped forms. Cast packaging elements act as a parallel taxonomy, placing plants, pollinators, and consumer artifacts within the same ordering structure. The work begins to resemble a cosmological index, attempting to organize knowledge across scales while quietly registering the instability of that effort.