Worm Bath is a bioactive installation of site-specific mulch, wild mycelia, and clear municipal water, inoculated with pollution-consuming fungi (blue and pink oyster mushrooms), thousands of native grass seeds, and the nutrient-rich remains of an on-site plastic-consuming mealworm colony. This living assemblage of dirt, (de/re)composition, and repair changes form over the life of this exhibition, becoming muddier, murkier, less toxic, and more alive. The opposite of clean is not dirty, but alive. Worm Bath begins with a stock tank full of inoculated and seeded mulch, stuffed inside an entangled mound of porous, human-sized, worm forms. As the bath continues, the water becomes browner, more alive, and less contaminated with microplastics, PFAs, and other petroleum-by products, through the metabolic process of the blue and pink oyster mushrooms living inside the worms. The work also becomes greener, at least for a time, as the native grasses come alive on the surface of the “worms.” Worm Bath emits its own posthuman soundscape of fungal water dripping, flowing, and bubbling over a multi-tonal din of pumps humming and whirring.

AltEr Piece hangs above Worm Bath contextualizing – and maybe honoring – the (de/re)composition it holds with a material painting of chromatic light, cast through and over the remains of Feast Cycle: a years-long project of caring for and engaging with a colony of metamorphosing mealworms as they slowly eat and transform endless mounds of polystyrene plastic into biodegradable, organic fertilizer. A more-than-human altar painting to honor and tell the story – not of sacrifice, suffering, and isolation, but of collective pleasure, the reparative potential of desire, and the sacred possibility of alter-ation.

presented as part of Method: Technology, Ecology, Embodiment curated by Supercollider at Angels Gate Cultural Center in tandem with Getty PST: Art + Science Collide