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.
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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.
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
A bacterial cellulose tray for holding a small stone.
A speculative collaboration with bacteria to design a nightstand.
Stenciled ASCII image of two hands playing with string figures
Creating structure for textiles and care using the labor of Pleurotus Ostreatus and myself.
by Austin Chia, Leyi Guo, Mantis Harper-Blanco, Katherine Luna, Maia Malakoff, Nadia Nazar, Jingwen Zhang How can we practice care…
MADDIE OLSEN, FINN YENCKEN, SARAH BECKER, LILY XIAO, ORIN NOEL, RILEY COX, STARLING WOLFRUM With their project exploring bacterially-produced mineral…
“my God is dark
and like a web:
a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.”
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
put your 50 word project sttement here
A basket made out of pieced bacterial cellulose, naturally dyed with indigo, logwood, pokeberry, and cutch: a basket to hold the remnants of a lifecycle, to become a placeholder for time, to honor the gathering of information, to pay respect to process, to give back to the the soil we came from.
Mycelium project using reishi mushrooms.
What is the future of natural dyes? Can our clothes be dyed with bacteria? For the bacterial drawings project, I was interested in testing the potential of bacteria as a “natural” dye to see if it would dye natural fibers. Building connections with all natural beings, bacteria included, is a collaboration that I am passionate about for my material research in my practice.
The way that mycelium grow triggered me thinking of the idea of bond, in many different contexts. The most intuitive one for me is the knot that we have on clothes. Especially in Chinese traditional clothing, the way to tie a knot is very elaborate. So I did some research and happened to find that one of the knot name included my mother’s name. It is interesting how it bonds me to this specific knot through the bond between me and my mother.
Try to inflate a cellulose and use an arduino and a heart rate sensor to control the inflating action. By controlling different inflation and deflation time, the cellulose can simulate the sensation of breathing and heartbeat.
Continuing from my bacterial print under the same image and title, I was interested in how to carry these conversations into the realm of folk craft and culture. To do so, I decided to experiment with turmeric anthotypes with the bacterial cellulose.