Sweet Corruptions 2010-2012
Sweet Corruptions began by inserting myself into the work and life of Ellen H. Richards, an American sanitary chemist working in the late nineteenth century who studied air, water and food. She was the first woman to receive a PhD from MIT as well as MIT's first female professor. Richards also brought the word ecology into the English language (from the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel). What drew me to her life’s work was her deep investment in the interconnectivity of all things. Richards seemed to believe that if one could understand daily life scientifically, at once breaking down its constituent elements and correlating them into an interwoven totality, all problems would be solved—all suffering and hardship eliminated. Throughout her work there is a tension between this commitment to the fluid totality of life and her insistence that each component of that life must be situated in its singular and proper place. For Richards, a sanitary lens, one of isolation and magnification, was key to this proper situating. This tension or dynamic between shifting networks and magnified singularities is not unlike the one I explore in my own work—attempting to capture states of transformation, shifts in scale between macro and micro worlds.
The connective link for me throughout the study of her work was the idea of compost. I too divided my work among her categories of air, water and food. I collected water and air samples and preserved all the food waste from my family’s consumption, one month for every season for three years. I both documented the process and used the observation of the specimens and the documentation as the basis for the drawings and paintings. While Richards does not describe her own work in terms of cosmology, I saw her ecology as a kind of cosmology. Both of our practices involve world-building, testing, empirical inquiry and interaction with daily life.
The images here are paintings, watercolors and photographic documentation of the food waste preservation process. I’ve turned to an art historical tradition, looking through the lens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting that dealt with the four elements, to think both about my own relationship to the elements and about the structures painting has historically had at its disposal to encompass the immensity of this subject. But unlike the historical tradition of showing man’s mastery over the elements, and nature in general—I’m interested in enacting the opposite.
The connective link for me throughout the study of her work was the idea of compost. I too divided my work among her categories of air, water and food. I collected water and air samples and preserved all the food waste from my family’s consumption, one month for every season for three years. I both documented the process and used the observation of the specimens and the documentation as the basis for the drawings and paintings. While Richards does not describe her own work in terms of cosmology, I saw her ecology as a kind of cosmology. Both of our practices involve world-building, testing, empirical inquiry and interaction with daily life.
The images here are paintings, watercolors and photographic documentation of the food waste preservation process. I’ve turned to an art historical tradition, looking through the lens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting that dealt with the four elements, to think both about my own relationship to the elements and about the structures painting has historically had at its disposal to encompass the immensity of this subject. But unlike the historical tradition of showing man’s mastery over the elements, and nature in general—I’m interested in enacting the opposite.