IN PROCESS: Materiality and the Timeline of Objects

Although younger and younger generations are becoming more educated and passionate about climate change, each year the fast fashion industry grows exponentially. We are consuming more and more contributing more plastic and non-degradable waste to our planet, killing her faster. On one hand, we don’t think of objects as living parts of our world, although they truly are. They are born, they live out a purpose, and they die. Their lifetime and the period of time between living out their purpose and death, is so vastly different than ours that we see the end of their living purpose as their death, but really they will waste away slowly and at such a longer pace than we will even exist.

I am exploring how quickly bio-materials fade and disintegrate, the natural forms they take, and different recipes in order to create different material qualities for functional and formal purposes i.e. soft, hard, malleable, transparent, opaque, etc. I will construct these materials into a series of objects and document their shortened life cycles and their ability to fade into the soil, giving back to the earth that they were born from.

This project explores two aspects to this cognitive dissonance we collectively feel in regards to climate change and consumption habits. 1) We continue to fight our extreme urges to consumer faster and faster in this increasingly neoliberal society, but we are failing more each year. Rather than fighting this urge, why don’t we embrace that bio-materials degrade so quickly? We cannot use them in commercial production because they “weaken in weather and disintegrate quickly,” but why can’t we integrate that short life-cycle into the extremely fast consumption cycles we continue to partake in, making objects that fade into the earth and give back to the soil around them? This first purpose is meant to connect with the product development design audience. 2) This project also works to challenge the idea that objects are not living and do not have lives, and meant to connect to a broader and more general viewing audience. By shortening the life cycle of the object, this challenges the notion that things that are not satient or have biological roots have no lives. In a material world, everything has a life, and this project shortens the lifetime of the object to challenge these ideas.