
Future Fossils and Glaze Dreams




Using the Djerassi clay, I began to test out an idea that I had been thinking about for the last year. As part of my project Total Archive, I had conceptualized interspecies ghost creatures which would be amalgamated forms algorithmically generated from the IUCN Red List. I wanted to make negative impressions of these hybrid creatures as future fossils—remnants of our current endangered species for a speculative future. I made a few prototypes from the Djerassi clay for the Djerassi land. Combining threatened species of the Santa Cruz mountains, these fossils, made from the local clay, help us to think about how we will remember these species when they are gone. Thinking about these hybrid creatures, I also wondered how such a ghost would dream of its past—how it would dream of us. I glazed these fossils with a mugwort ash glaze. Danny Goldberg had told us that mugwort gives you dreams—I imagined that this mugwort from the land would infuse the objects with some of its dream spirit.
I shared these pieces at Leonardo@Djerassi Open Studios along with a video animation work of 3D objects collected from various science labs that are working on 3D scanning organisms (RISD Nature Lab, Cal State Humboldt 3D Digital Herbarium, amongst others). Using scans of threatened and endangered species, the work examines the intimate nature of recording that lies between scientists and the species at the focus of their research.