MICROTOPIAS

During my month living as Artist-in-Residence at the Sointula Art Shed in 2024, I worked alongside the 26 elementary school children of the coastal fishing village on Malcolm Island. Together, we brought “BabyLegs” to life to learn about combining citizen science with media art and marine microplastics with microscope animation.

Plastics, whether they’re wasteful or not, are inextricable from living systems and a bewildering inheritance for us all. MICROTOPIAS posed the questions: what in the world is plastic? By attuning to the myriad forms of plastic all around us, we noticed how it appears in our lives, and pondered what may come of all the plastic that already exists.

Inspired greatly by Pollution is Colonialism by Dr. Max Liboiron and implementing the DIY BabyLegs resources shared by Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) which is a feminist, anti-colonial science research laboratory studying marine plastics.