Embroidery

Adapting to New Substrates is my fantasy that microorganisms and larvae will evolve to live on and digest various plastics –plastic bags, Styrofoam, bubble wrap, face masks, and plastic cups–that clog our environment. Certain embroidery stitches startlingly resemble bacteria, fungus colonies, fungal structures like mycelia and branching septate hyphae, and moth larvae, as seen through a microscope and in actual size. Researchers worldwide are working to cultivate bacteria whose enzymes break down plastic. Wax moth larvae have been found that eat plastic. Beetle larvae, known as superworms, have been shown to digest Styrofoam. However, these solutions will have to be practical on the global scale to manage the increasing amounts of plastic accumulating on the planet.

I've been fascinated with shapes of bacteria since I majored in bacteriology in college. Recently, while taking an embroidery class, I was startled to find that particular stitches resembled bacterial rods and cocci, and fungal structures like mycelia and hyphae. Using the colors of stains, agar media, and light microscope fields in the laboratory, I embroidered specific bacteria referring to their actual stained colors (purple for Gram positive and orange/pink for Gram negative stain) and characteristics such as relative size, flagella, endospores, arrangement pattern, immunofluorescence, and others. Setting them into Petri dishes places them in a laboratory context.