grow, 2013
Plastic Bags

grow is a series of durational installations in a number of public buildings throughout the city of Milwaukee and the surrounding areas. At each location, a system of interconnected plant-like forms, simulating a self-propagating organism in multiple stages of development, grows over time utilizing reused plastic bags as base material. The layers of plastic are fused together to create a surface similar to leather or skin, molded into plant-like volumes, connected with plastic bag "thread" and stuffed with plastic bags, creating a system made out of a singular material-reused plastic. I have set up official plastic recycling bins at each location, periodically collecting the bags, and adding onto each organism with the materials collected from that location. Public involvement ranges from contributing plastic bags for specific locations to participating in workshops on manipulating plastic bags as a raw material. Like weeds, these organisms grow into unused and overlooked spaces: niches, stairwells, and other peripheral and forgotten architectural elements. My goal in grow is to transform an artificial manipulated material into a seemingly unchecked, feral, opportunistic growth, to visualize and punctuate reuse by juxtaposing it with slow, methodical, labor-intensive making that plays with control, "craftiness", and precision, and to speculate about sustaining artificial lifecycles.

—Yevgeniya Kaganovich