This piece is in conversation with my bacterial cellulose project, “Cellular Portrait.” I was once again inspired by the relationship between the source material and the final product, so I have created another sculpture of my mother’s face to reference the connections between the different phases of mycelium.
For this piece, I formed my mother’s face out of bacterial cellulose. Throughout the process of growing the cellulose, I was thinking about the relationship between the original pellicle to the larger one I was growing and how it mimicked a parent and child relationship.
For this project, I was thinking of the microcosmic vs. microcosmic. There is an uncountable amount of cells in a given spot of Ecoli on a Petri dish, similar to the amount of stars in the sky. I think of bacterial colonies as a little family and began thinking of the familial relationships inherent in horoscopes. My mother gave me my star sign: five little stars in a vast universe.