Painters who start sculpting never go back. Sculpting is much more performative. There’s something about working through the material with your hands to produce an infinite amount of surfaces. Even when you form an object completely unfamiliar, completely abstract and bewildering to look at, the materials are still familiar, real, and understandable. You then find yourself on a circuitous route to creating a highly chaotic system.

Lately, I dream of embedding bacteria into a sculpture and allowing it to grow to the point that it transforms the material entirely. I’ve practiced growing mycelium sculptures using molds, which is kind of similar. I’m also learning how to drown materials in resin-like substances, like dead fish in Purell hand sanitizer. It’s kind of funny. I got really obsessed with hand sanitizer right before the global pandemic, and now I have some sitting in a sticky bag in my studio.

When I was living in New York, I was freaking out over how many people touch subway rails. I started looking into the history of sanitation products and learned all kinds of things. Companies in the 1950s introduced single-use plastics into the market at the same time that people began stocking their homes with chemical cleaning products. I was asking, why did these two consumer products emerge at the same time? Interestingly, poison control hotlines emerged in the 1950s because children began to consume Lysol wipes. Were they swallowing plain washrags in the 40s? Or was this just now happening for the first time?

Through my research, I found all kinds of scary things happening in science. I discovered Donna J. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and began to think a lot about the body and what I’m eating. I discovered synthetic biology and lab-grown meat and cellular agriculture and tissue-growing. We’ve created this environment dependent on GMO-plants and food sources, and we don’t yet know their long-term consequences. I’m scared of the ramifications. 

I discovered that aquariums began as information spaces, but they’re recently transitioning into sensory-based experiences. “Let’s all feel the fish inside this giant touch pool! Let’s forget these spaces are increasingly funded by oil companies to distract us from what they’re doing to the ocean! How they’re adding to the decline of aquatic life!” It’s funny, because aquariums ask you to wash your hands after touching the fish, but they don’t tell you to do so beforehand.

I stumbled upon CRISPR gene editing technology. We can now cut and paste a gene from one organism into another. If you want a bacteria to slime the way a snail does, you can cut and paste that gene, and then you have excreting bacteria. Want to do the same thing to stem cells? Now you can. I’m surprised more people don’t know about CRISPR. It’s going to affect all of us very soon. It has the power to help us and prevent the genealogical spread of horrible diseases. But it also raises tough questions. Should we use CRISPR to rid chromosomal conditions like Down syndrome? What are we telling people with Down’s when we say it’s a bad thing to have?

CRISPR opens up the world to gene drives. I learned a lot about these from the Netflix show, Unnatural Selection. On Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they’re pasting an engineered gene that can be passed down through the germline into the mouse population to prevent the spread of Lyme disease to ticks, and thus to humans. Do we really know how this stuff works, and what’s the impact on such complex ecosystems?

With the advancement of gene drives, companies can now create designer babies. Some parents now not only choose cosmetic features like eye and hair color or the shape of someone’s nose, but mental and physical ability. And then when these babies become adults and start to have children, such traits can be inherited, compounding the engineered structure of it all.

Imagine if we genetically engineered ourselves to produce sap like trees. Sap is kind of like a resin that oozes out when trees get a scab on their skin. What if instead of pus coming out of our human scabs, we produced biological resin from which we could build sculptures? Roads? Buildings? Infrastructure? That would be crazy. Likewise, nail clippings are made of keratin, so couldn’t they be used to create ceramics? Instead of exploiting the environment, why not ourselves?

All of this was in the back of my mind as my practice began to take shape. I was thinking a lot about my sculptures as if they were ourselves, engineered over and over and over again, to the point of absolute compoundment, when we explode and suffuse into this disgusting and sweet, bright, glossy thing.

Of course, people are beginning to question the ethics of CRISPR trickling down into the garages of DIY biologists. There aren’t many safety regulations for DIY spaces, and the ethics of CRISPR in general are murky. He Jiankui from China used CRISPR to edit the embryos of two twins, making them immune to HIV. No one had ever tried CRISPR on humans before, and it seems his motivations were to be the first to do it rather than to help. The entire science community said, “Don’t fucking do this — you’re going to cause tons of regulations and we’ll all be inhibited from doing any research or testing any animals and no one truly knows the effects it will have on those kids!” and he did it anyway.

I met all kinds of people in the DIY community by attending conferences and lab-scale nights and checking out Genspace in New York and Baltimore Underground Science Space. The DIY bio-world is so fascinating because it’s such a niche community, and the people are super welcoming, and best of all, they’re all super crazy. You know the film that grows on top of kombucha? That’s called SCOBY, a mixed culture of bacteria and yeast. You can dry them out into papers to be used as a material. Hardcore DIY biologists who want to implant magnets under their own skin use these SCOBY papers to practice stitching. Some people are using these magnets to sense radio waves and magnetic fields and unlock their apartments and swipe credit cards. So playing around with kombucha inspires new frontiers.

More and more, people who don’t work in traditional science settings or within academia have access to spaces and communities where they can explore what interests them. These people personally taught me protein purification, RNA isolation, and how to sterilize my bioplastics to prevent them from molding. I wanted to dive deeper when I moved to Los Angeles, and so I began working with Elliot Roth’s spirulina algae company, Spira. We produce a natural, edible blue pigment that I use in some sculptures. It’s really nice to feel like I can do science as an artist and know it’s okay to be bad at it.

Aside from the subway rails, another factor prompted my move to Los Angeles: I needed access to a studio where I could pour resin, which is too toxic to pour in a New York apartment. I fell in love with resin for its versatility. In a way, it’s the material for our generation: it has so many qualities and can be used for anything. Yet it’s so dangerous because it’s petroleum-based, carcinogenic, and an endocrine-disruptor, making it toxic to humans and the environment.

But as a raw byproduct of plastic, resin is also transparent. I’ve always been obsessed with transparency, and I’m trying to find out why that is. I like to use the analogy of a fountain. You hear fountains before you see them, and the sound grants you a sense of coolness and refreshment, and so you search for it. I think about transparent objects in this way. They seem to quench the eye’s thirst for the fountain. For me, looking at clear and glossy objects is like filling an innate thirst for water. They absorb all light outside of the visible spectrum, and so when you look at them, you look at the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And when you embed an object in clear material, like how I do with fish skeletons and carcasses in resin, Drano, or hand sanitizer, it’s cool that you can see the objects suspended there but can’t actually reach them. That’s how I feel when I look at something beneath the water, like even at fish swimming past.

Transparent sculptures also challenge me to question what I can’t see in the world around me and the water I consume — there’s bacteria growing on my shower head in the one room meant to keep me clean; there’s chlorine and fluorine injected into my drinking water; there’s petroleum and oil and gas injected into who knows how many bodies of water, in places I can’t see and sites I can’t access.

Because I’ve always had such a strong attraction to clear things, I get excited for any transparent plastics. They’re there, and they’re not there. They’re slippery, they’re confusing. Maybe I like them because they point to things we cannot see? 

Plastics are the lining of our everyday lives. It feels like they exist in everything. But because they don’t decompose, they build up in the oceans and release endocrine disruptors that cause genetic mutations to sea life. Scientists report that rain droplets on average carry more and more microplastics, which means plastic has infiltrated the entire water cycle. Plastics also tend to be really good surfaces for bacteria to grow on. If our subways, restaurants, and shopping center were lined with antimicrobial and antiviral alternatives, we could better prevent diseases and viruses like coronavirus from spreading.

The more this becomes apparent, and the more I question where things originate and where things go, the more I want to work toward a zero waste industry. Increasingly on my mind is how we don’t know where our materials like resin come from because industries produce them for our consumption. As a sculptor, I don’t have control over the source of my materials or what I’m exposing to my body unless I make them myself. The only option for everyday people is to buy a toxic two-part mix that comes in a box from Reynolds. I find myself faced with the familiar artistic paradox of our times: how do you create and sell artwork that is sustainable and friendly to the environment and people’s health, yet lasts a lifetime? Sculpture that doesn’t last long isn’t as easy to market.

So I began searching for biomaterial alternatives that are sustainable, non-toxic, antimicrobial, and last a long time. The dominant industries researching these materials are architecture, fashion, and design because they make consumable goods, but these practices are only recently entering the peripheral vision of artists like myself, so there aren’t many products I can purchase for my personal use. And regardless, it’s difficult to know where these materials come from or if they are compostable, and many are coated with synthetic plastic anyways. So I make them myself.

The process of making bio-alternatives is just like cooking. You can combine natural materials like seaweed with gelatin or agar, stir with natural binders like glycerin and water, pour, and allow it to evaporate. To prevent it from molding, just blow it down with a fan. And that’s all it takes. But as a sculptor, I find most of these materials frustrating because they’re all flat, and I need something castable and thick. I’ve grown mycelium from mushroom roots because it works better than gelatin or agar, but it isn’t very strong, and it isn’t transparent. 

One of the first castable plastics was actually made by pressing curdled milk and vinegar until all the juices escaped and only a solid remained. Today, many people practice molding these milk solids into shapes. Then there’s the world of synthetic biology. Research companies like Spiber in Japan synthetically grow spider silk from bacteria (not spiders) to replace plastic-based textiles. Spiber recently collaborated with The North Face to create a jacket out of synthetic spider silk.

The material most exciting to me is chitosan, which comes from one of the largest food wastes in the seafood industry: crustacean shells. Chitosan is a super strong biopolymer powder which, when dissolved in vinegar, turns into a solid with relatively high tensile strength and optical transparency. But its potential doesn’t stop at sculptors looking for new materials to work with. Chitosan can be used as a biomaterial for medicine because it’s biocompatible, antimicrobial, and potentially antiviral. This also means chitosan would be a better alternative for everyday plastics and could be implemented into our built environment to prevent the spread of viruses like coronavirus. In addition, I would need a strong natural binder, preferably something aquatic so it could naturally decompose into its original molecules if returned to the ocean alongside chitosan.

That strong natural binder, I realized, comes from the hagfish, an eel-shaped deep sea fish that produces slime as a defense mechanism. Its slime is a giant hydrogel with really thin fibers that are finer than spider silk, finer than the keratin in your hair, but stronger than nylon. It’s such a weird material because when you stretch it, it becomes stronger. Hagfish slime rapidly expands 10,000 times in the presence of seawater, and its mucous matrix contains 10 nm fibers composed almost entirely of intermediate filament protein. Specialized cells in the hagfish, called gland thread cells, organize these fibers into threads 1-3 microns in diameter and 10– 20 cm long. In self-defense, hagfish rapidly excrete a mucinous gel embedded with these fine, strong fibers. The animal can be stimulated to release mucus without injury, so it’s a sustainable option for producing fibers as strong as fiberglass.

I realized that my research to find more sustainable sculpting materials as an artist could take me on a journey to finding better plastic alternatives as a scientist. The Navy and researchers at Utah State University are investing in packageable slime production for commercial scale, so it could be relatively available soon. With this knowledge, I’ve applied to a research position at Caltech to conduct experiments combining chitosan with hagfish slime fibers to develop a strong, optically clear and castable biocomposite to replace epoxy resin.

In self-defence, hagfish rapidly excrete a mucinous gel embededed with fine, strong fibers.

Despite the fact I want to one day use only bio-based materials, I know I’ll always hold a strange attraction to synthetic things. I can use solid Purell or resin to mask the stench of dead fish embedded in my sculptures. It’s interesting to place a “wet” technology inside of a “dry one.” It’s the reverse of putting a dry magnet under your skin, and I like to play around with that dichotomy. Conceptually, I find it curious and captivating that an artificial layer can go between me and the natural world. 

There’s so much of that happening outside of my studio, in the real world, everywhere I go. There’s a reason we’ve hung on to synthetics for centuries — they’re functional. It’s who we have all become, it’s how we all are. We’ve been primed to trust in synthetics over biomaterials out of a fear of controlling environmental entropy. The question of creating functional objects out of other living things is horrifying and profound to so many people because we’ve relied on synthetics for so long. We don’t want to question our dependence on synthetics, but we’re also too afraid to ask what to make of ourselves when we challenge this long tradition. Does it make us cyborgs to rely so heavily on plastics and metals? What credit do we give to the natural molecules that compose our genetic makeup versus the unnatural ones that invade it? It’s one big Tragedy of the Commons. The things that sustain us will ultimately destroy us. I’m trying to test those boundaries.