Every September in Newfoundland we have the food fishery, where every Newfoundlander can catch five fish per person, per day, for a week. People tend to catch cod. During the 2015 food fishery, my students and I gathered the guts of 205 fish from the food fishery to see what the cod had been eating. We were looking for plastic. What we found is pictured below, captured from the camera built into our laboratory microscope. Is it plastic, or not? Cod Objects (Ingestion […]

Categories: Art

Dinner Plates (Northern Fulmar), 2015 Digital photographs These images are part of a larger series called Seeing Like a Scientist. When we are doing plastic ingestion studies in the laboratory, we dissect animal gastrointestinal tracts to see what they’ve eaten. We’re looking for plastics, but a lot of things look like plastics. These images were taken in the lab during a study of Northern Fulmar from the Labrador Sea. All of the hard and plastic-like objects are removed from the bird’s guts, put […]

Categories: Art

Sea globes, 2013-2014 Ocean plastics, historical landfill, New York City kitschSmall globes: 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ diameter Large globe: 7 1/8″ x 6″ diamter This series of sea globes are genuine New York City souvenirs. The plastics came from the Hudson River in south Brooklyn, and the rocks are made of bituminous coal from in a landfill that closed in the 1930s at Deadhorse Bay, which now resides underwater at high tide, also in south Brooklyn. The snails are […]

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Salt-winning: Equal To or Greater Than, 2010-2011 Glass, road salt, trash Oxygen Art Center, Nelson, BC, Canada Rule of exchange: You can take anything at any time as long as you exchange it with something of equal or greater value. Salt-winning: Equal To or Greater Than is a trash-based social economy. Over one hundred miniature globes were created from discarded glass, trash, and winter road salt. Each globe could be taken away by gallery visitors at any time as long […]

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Photocopies, 2007 Early colonial woodcuts, engravings, and drawings illustrate a nature that is resource rich, highly feminized, untamed, unspoiled, and ripe for conquest. These simple collages are from New World woodcuts meant to objectively and scientifically illustrate the flora and fauna of the the Americas. Instead, the results are dirty pictures. This series was photocopied and put up in natural history and plant biology buildings at several post secondary institutions. If you would like high resolution copies to do something […]

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Dioramas of North series, 2007 This two miniature dioramas are inset with pinhole photographs of plastic toys in the Alaskan landscape. Tiny people stand outside the glass, looking in. The pieces tell stories of institutions telling stories about the north. They depict a romanticized, national, often plastic idea of North, where the land and racist ideas about indigeneity are intertwined.

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Utopia Diorama series, 2005-2006 pinhole photographs These pinhole photographs were taken at the American Museum of Natural History. They highlight the pastoral, fantastic, and technological character of nature within institutions where romanticism and science come together.

Categories: Art