Beyond Solutionism: Decay as Relational Practice in Bioplastic Art

Abstract

Plastic, once celebrated as an innovative solution to the scarcity of natural resources, has become a defining marker of the Anthropocene. Initially developed to protect the natural world by offering an artificial substitute for scarce natural materials, it has instead revealed the entanglement between human innovation and ecological degradation. As plastic infiltrates every ecosystem, it embodies both human ingenuity and the consequences of extractivist practices and unsustainable plastic production and consumption. Realising that I cannot eliminate plastic from the world, I have chosen to address plastic pollution and ecological grief by engaging directly with its problematic materiality. My practice-based research explores this relationship through the production of bioplastic from natural materials for sculptural objects, allowing these artworks to undergo processes of decay and documenting the material degradation through microscopic imagery.

My creative process is guided by the primary question of how artistic experimentation with bioplastics can reframe decay as a relational and generative rather than as an endpoint or loss. To deepen this investigation, several secondary questions are considered. One asks how the decomposition of bioplastic artworks, especially when observed through microscopic imagery, might reveal new aesthetic and ethical relationships with the nonhuman. Another explores how the processes of decay, transformation, and return to the earth can be understood as acts of care, highlighting the ethical and ecological significance of material impermanence. In analysing my installation Echoes in Time alongside a series of microscopic images such as Coexistence of Geological Vastness and Microscopic Closeness, I draw on Donna Haraway’s concept of response-ability, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, and Bayo Akomolafe’s ethics of care, understood as active, experimental, and transformative. These frameworks allow me to explore the ethical and affective dimensions of working with plastic matter and nonhuman life forms that carry traces of ecological and cultural entanglement. These frameworks facilitate an understanding of decay as active, agentic and vital in a shared process in which humans and nonhumans continually reshape each other and their shared environments.

Echoes in Time is an installation of a series of fossil-like bioplastic sculptures incorporating ash from a single season’s fireplace burnings that invite microbial growth on the surface. These sculptures are moulded from wooden matrices composed of vineyard and orchard prunings. The addition of wood ash serves as both structural filler and conceptual device, providing a stone-like, fossilised but decaying aesthetic. In an analysis of the work, I consider the experimental creative process that attempts to work alongside the agency of the material rather than controlling it for my creative expression. Coexistence of Geological Vastness and Microscopic Closeness is one of several scanning electron microscope images from small portions of my sculptures. The microscope image, which looks like spores on a bioplastic landscape, offers a glimpse into a nonhuman world that feels unusual and unexpected as it incorporates a radical shift in scale that attempts to reposition human and nonhuman relationships. Through theoretical inquiry and artistic practice, this paper argues that decay can be a framework for ethical and empathetic coexistence with nonhuman agents. Recognising the inevitability of material and ecological transformation cultivates response-ability, relationality, and care, enabling a mode of witnessing attentive, situated, and generative decay. Reinterpreting decay in this way contributes to ecologically attuned and responsive approaches to artmaking in the Anthropocene.