Mekong Monsters: River Clean-up and Trash Art, Nong Khai, Thailand

This river clean-up and trash sculpture workshop was completed with Fine Arts students and faculty from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL) and the Mekong Artist Collective, of which I am a founding member.. Students learned how to do a plastic audit and spent a day cleaning a stretch of the Mekong River to collect a large amount of trash. After washing and cleaning the materials, participants designed their own ‘Mekong Monster’ and used the collected materials to create a trash sculpture related to human, non-human, and more-than-human entities inhabiting the Mekong River region. The following day, participants gave a brief presentation about their sculptures and shared in a group discussion about what we collectively learned from the experience. The sculptures were later exhibited at the art gallery at KMITL.

Un-visualizing Elephants: a PhotoVoice Project, Chiang Mai, Thailand

This 3-part workshop focused on arts-based research about human-elephant relationships in Thailand. I commissioned Ruangsak Anuwatwimon to create a life-sized elephant sculpture, which was created with Pietro Lo Casto and other prior to the workshops. For the first workshop, the participants went to the Chiang Mai sanctuary, Elephant Nature Park, where we learned about elephants, animal welfare, and community-based conservation. Participants took photos of the elephants, and were then asked to photograph representations of elephants in art, advertising, religion, and architecture in Chiang Mai. Each participant submitted their photographs, which were printed for the second workshop, where Pietro Lo Casto led a photography discussion. For the final workshop, the participants used the printed photos of real/imagined elephants to paper-mache the commissioned elephant sculpture.

Eco-Artivism: Weaving with Plastic Against Plastic III, Chiang Mai, Thailand

This collaborative workshop was completed with Fine Arts students and Faculty from the Media, Arts, and Design Department at Chiang Mai University. Prior to the workshop, I met with the students and introduced the project and asked them to begin collecting plastic at their homes, work, and school. In lieu of building a loom for the workshop, we were able to source discarded fence pieces from the university, which were constructed into a shape of the cube. On the day of the workshop, over 90 participants came and wove their recycled materials around the fence cube. The cube remained in the building courtyard as an interactive installation with signage encouraging people to add their plastic to the cube, which stayed up for 3 months.

Eco-Artivism: Weaving with Plastic Against Plastic II, MSU Museum, East Lansing, Michigan

As part of the the 1.5 Degrees Celsius exhibit at the Michigan State University Museum (which featured 2 of my large plastic weavings), I provided a plastic weaving workshop open to university students and the community at the STEM Teaching & Learning Building. I built a simple double-sided frame loom, and participants brought their own plastic to weave both sides of the loom. After the workshop, the loom was transported to the MSU Museum, where museum patrons were encouraged to add plastic to the weaving throughout the exhibit.

Plastic Project: Southern River Terrapin Installation & Video Art, Siem Reap, Cambodia

During my role as Exhibitions Coordinator at the Fauna in Focus Nature Discovery Center in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I created a series of programming about plastic pollution for World Wildlife Day with local Cambodian students and a group of American exchange students. The workshop had 4 separate meetings: participants spent the first day doing a trash clean-up of the Siem Reap River, followed by a day of cleaning and sorting the trash where we chose to only use plastic bottles, which were painted with biodegradable paint. For the third meeting, we arranged thousands of the colorfully painted plastic bottles in the shape of a Southern River Terrapin in the field next to the Nature Discovery Center. Lastly, the workshop provided students the opportunity to learn drone photography and video editing, and they helped create a video of the project which was released for World Wildlife Day.