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 can distance us from the living systems that sustain us.

I keep returning to the fact that these containers once held food—something that nourishes us—while the plants painted on them belong to the larger ecological systems that make nourishment possible in the first place. In a way, the two compete for our attention. The package is immediate and familiar; we handle it, empty it, and discard it. The plant points back toward something older, more complex, and easier to overlook. By casting the disposable container in cement, I give it an almost absurd permanence, while the painted plant carries another kind of value: fragility, resilience, and the capacity to produce awe. I am interested in whether that collision can redirect our attention away from the container and back toward what the container—and ultimately we ourselves—depend upon.

As they accumulate, the works begin to form a kind of counter-archive of the Anthropocene. Often arranged in vertical systems, they move between botanical specimens, ecological relationships such as pollination, variations within a species, and the cast forms of consumer packaging itself. Plants, pollinators, and industrial artifacts occupy the same visual taxonomy, creating something between a field guide, an index, and a cosmological map—an attempt to organize relationships across scales while acknowledging how unstable those systems have become.