Interior Landscapes was on display from December 6th to February 28th 2022 as part of the On the Inside with You exhibition at Space p11 curated by Jonathan Solomon and David L. Hays.
The project was completed with Alex Gagle and Samantha Panger.
Data for interior Landscapes provided courtesy of Rob R. Dunn, Reynolds Professor, Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University.
Since March 2020, we’ve been largely housebound and on edge, obsessing over cleanliness and microbial life, trying to keep a virus out of our homes. Meanwhile an entire invisible ecosystem of species exists on the edges of our domestic environment. While we primarily think of domestic space as occupied by humans, interiors are in fact home to an astonishing multiplicity of life forms: up to 12 types of mammals, 1,000 insects, 51,965 fungi types, and 97,800 bacteria, according to the “Wild Life of our Homes” by The Public Science Lab. Coming out of the pandemic, this study's comprehensive data collection of the microbial communities found in the invisible dust covering a number of domestic locations inspired Interior Landscapes, a conceptual project including a series of drawings and casts.
We cast the edges of five common household elements in bio-based epoxy and portrayed them through representations at the microscale. At twenty-five-thousandths of an inch, edges blur, as we and the objects around us are in a state of constant disintegration to minuscule fragments. Microbial organisms and particles such as pollen grains, fungi, viruses, bacteria, tardigrades, face mites, human hair and skin flakes blend together in an outer layer covering all the surfaces of the interior. At this scale, the traditional semiotics of the domestic become unfamiliar yet bountiful Interior Landscapes.