Angelina Cheng,
Class of 2024
Artist educator
‘Compost Project’
Biodegradable materials
Class of 2024
Artist educator
‘Compost Project’
Biodegradable materials
Compost Project is an ongoing project of artmaking using biodegradable materials, including paint mediums, binding agents, fixings, and fittings. All artworks are compostable and provide key nutrients for conditioning the soil.
The project is inspired by an analogy, made by theorist Donna Haraway in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, in which she rejects the terminology of ‘post-humanism’ and instead proposes a ‘compost pile’ as a challenge to anthropocentric epistemology. In Compost Project, I, the maker, am merely another participant of the composting process, and the artwork is never completed until it naturally breaks down into the soil.
By using waste materials collected in daily life to make art that is compostable, I interrogate the commercialised and collectable values of the contemporary art world, and the ‘temporality’ of the fragile space/time which an artwork occupies. I have collected and ‘composted’ (breaking apart, blending, chewing, chopping, churning, dissolving, digesting, layering, piling on, compressing, tearing…) materials, and have experimented and collaborated with materials in learning the agency of the material world. The action of composting thus unfolds on two scales. Through the microscopic lens, materials breakdown by enactment of different organisms such as bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and fungi. On the macroscopic scale, all critters, matters and lives on earth are in a ‘hot mess’, making and dying in unexpected collaborations and combinations, and ‘become-with’ each other in multi-species symbiosis.
Compost Project provides a methodology to improve the accessibility of artmaking in art education, and a rethinking/redoing of the value of art, in both material and conceptual terms.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fungus (Pleurotus djamor)
Egg tempera painting of pink oyster mushrooms on oyster-and-son shells
Egg yolk, artist-made pigments
Scientific Drawings of The Compost
Print on Paper
42 cm x 59.4 cm
Artist-made pigments
Eggshells, oyster shells, rocks found on Whitstable shingle beach
Whitstable Pacific oyster White
Whitstable red rock ochre
Whitstable coal black
Egg shell cream
Egg shell sand
Seaweed
Biodegradable plastic made from common spring weeds, agar agar and glycerine
Algae
Mixed media on avocado-pit-dyed cotton
Avocado pits, red onion peels, cotton, linen, wool, wire, forget-me-not, dandelion and unknown grass, pyropia, agar agar, glycerin
65 cm x 130 cm
Oyster and Sons
Giant papier mâché oyster shell, oyster shells
Amazon recycled packaging, wastepaper, flour, water, salt, chalk, rabbit skin glue, common spring weeds smoothie, pyropia, seaweed
Variable dimensions
By using waste materials collected in daily life to make art that is compostable, I interrogate the commercialised and collectable values of the contemporary art world, and the ‘temporality’ of the fragile space/time which an artwork occupies. I have collected and ‘composted’ (breaking apart, blending, chewing, chopping, churning, dissolving, digesting, layering, piling on, compressing, tearing…) materials, and have experimented and collaborated with materials in learning the agency of the material world. The action of composting thus unfolds on two scales. Through the microscopic lens, materials breakdown by enactment of different organisms such as bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and fungi. On the macroscopic scale, all critters, matters and lives on earth are in a ‘hot mess’, making and dying in unexpected collaborations and combinations, and ‘become-with’ each other in multi-species symbiosis.
Compost Project provides a methodology to improve the accessibility of artmaking in art education, and a rethinking/redoing of the value of art, in both material and conceptual terms.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fungus (Pleurotus djamor)
Egg tempera painting of pink oyster mushrooms on oyster-and-son shells
Egg yolk, artist-made pigments
Scientific Drawings of The Compost
Print on Paper
42 cm x 59.4 cm
Artist-made pigments
Eggshells, oyster shells, rocks found on Whitstable shingle beach
Whitstable Pacific oyster White
Whitstable red rock ochre
Whitstable coal black
Egg shell cream
Egg shell sand
Seaweed
Biodegradable plastic made from common spring weeds, agar agar and glycerine
Algae
Mixed media on avocado-pit-dyed cotton
Avocado pits, red onion peels, cotton, linen, wool, wire, forget-me-not, dandelion and unknown grass, pyropia, agar agar, glycerin
65 cm x 130 cm
Oyster and Sons
Giant papier mâché oyster shell, oyster shells
Amazon recycled packaging, wastepaper, flour, water, salt, chalk, rabbit skin glue, common spring weeds smoothie, pyropia, seaweed
Variable dimensions