Have a Nice Day, Ceramic, 2017

There is a suggestion of ephemerality to polystyrene takeout containers. They are fragile, single-use objects which, after serving their brief function of conveying leftover food from a restaurant to a home fridge, have no reason for further existence. Polystyrene cannot be used to heat food, in the general course of things they are not considered beautiful, and their presence in daily life is felt only briefly. So too do we treat plastic water bottles, with little care for their environmental impact because of their convenience. However, they both linger in landfills long after they are forgotten by the user. Human interactions with these objects are at odds with the permanent nature of the materials. 

Ceramic and polystyrene are surprisingly similar, yet the value placed on them differs drastically. Potsherds in the archeological record indicate pottery is one of the oldest technologies developed by humans. These broken fragments of pottery endure relatively unchanged from the time of their creation except where external forces have crushed or further broken them, and polystyrene promises to join the archeological record and endure in a similar fashion. 

For this piece I wanted people to actually look at takeout boxes and think about their longevity, and then consider the objects in our lives we treat as ephemeral when they are not. Fungi and other saprotrophs cannot consume and transform polystyrene to incorporate it into the cycles of a healthy ecosystem, so by rendering mushrooms—which are ephemeral—in a permanent material such as ceramic I hope to highlight this cognitive dissonance.