What Looks Like Water

2023

Assorted metal, DTM paint, polyester resin, hi-gloss sealer, burette, hydrogen peroxide, soil 

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What Looks Like Water is an installation composed of organic steel forms, lab equipment, and earth set up to loosely resemble crops in a field. These organic forms are imaginative and something different from typical plant forms. In the center of the tall, twisting sculpture is a burette that's filled with hydrogen peroxide that drips over time onto the exposed steel, or plant, and over time this causes it to rust itself. The situation of industrial agriculture has become a grey space and it's something that the artist believes has been necessary and without negative intention, but needs acknowledgment and action steering the direction it is headed.

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Through staging and specific materials, the artist seeks to describe the dynamic of industrial agriculture today. While the production of crops on a larger and faster scale has been beneficial to the growth of food security in society, as well as Western development and economies in recent decades, the consistent and increasing use of chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, have over time degraded the quality of the soil and the quality of the crops. This occurrence has perpetuated the need, and cycle, to continue using these substances to meet economic demand.

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