Tangling in her own limbs, the pit overgrows.
turquoise: real, synthetic, and stabilized; recycled plastic, repurposed familial costume jewelry, avocado pit, ceramic, Egyptian Blue faience, sterling silver, resin, rubber tubing
2026
Falling off the root, the dismembered pits can be relimbed as new bolo slides. New joints.
I clash ancient alchemical practices with modern simulacra. Plastic allows for decisions that are impulsive, impatient, and forceful. It aggregates fragments too small to hold together on their own, bubbling and burning into bezels that cushion and cradle. In the world of consumerist costume jewelry, plastic allows for limitless gemstone imitation. Non-precious. Infinitely reproducible. plastic both democratizes and anonymizes.
It erases regionality and specificity through standardization. Global landscapes continue to blur through simulacra that anonymizes space. Waste plastic coalesces in our landscpe as plastiglomerate minerals that mark our ecological damage.
My method of scartending creates plastiglomerates of the Southwest: amalgamations of clashing Indigenous and colonial histories. Tangled and broken landscapes that shouldn’t exist, yet they do. Ecological and feminist scholar Donna Haraway proposes compost as a new form of making kin in response to Anthroposceptic ecological threats. A sense of “making do” to envision possible futures.
My body is composted of bolouitl. Liminal queer sediment amalgamated from conflicting influences. Spurling with bolo cords that tangle and slide. I can’t help that my body is made of plastic, I can only make do.