Archaeological Debris,

2020–present

Multiple medium.

Bodies of Work: Sprouting Seeds; Ancient Echoes; Plastic Flints

Archaeological Debris is an ongoing body of work examining how ancestral objects, materials, and cultural knowledge survive after their original contexts have been fragmented or lost. The project began in 2020 through my experience of displacement and an attempt to reconnect with ancestral histories through archaeological fragments, tropical plants, drawing, and material experimentation. Rather than reconstructing an authentic pre-colonial past, I use the fragment as a starting point for creating new forms that exist between archaeological evidence, personal memory, biological life, and contemporary technology.

Sprouting Seeds combines charcoal drawings of tropical plants and archaeological forms with experiments in growing roots inside molds taken from ancient ceramic objects. The resulting sculptures use soil and living roots to inhabit ancestral forms, allowing them to grow, transform, deteriorate, or die in the present.

Ancient Echoes works with basalt artifacts, tools, and ceramics by reactivating their use today. Rather than approaching these objects solely as archaeological remains, I explore their capacity to act again—as tools, instruments, and carriers of memory. Through their physical reactivation, the objects connect my body to the people who once made and used them, allowing fragments of the past to acquire a voice in the present.

Plastic Flints examines archaeological fragments through contemporary technologies and materials. Pre-Columbian ceramics are translated into digital information through 3D scanning and rendering, while incomplete forms can undergo speculative digital reconstruction, including AI-generated interpretations of what is absent. Rather than treating these reconstructions as archaeological truth, I use the distance between the surviving fragment and its technological interpretation to examine how contemporary systems attempt to fill gaps in historical knowledge.

The work also considers what our own civilization will leave behind archaeologically. Using synthetic materials such as recycled expanded polystyrene, I contrast the ceramics, stone, and obsidian that survive from ancient societies with the persistent plastic debris of contemporary life. These synthetic forms become a kind of contemporary archaeological residue, reflecting a culture increasingly defined by disposability.

Together, these bodies of work approach archaeology not as a means of recovering a complete past, but as a way of examining what survives, what disappears, and what we create in response to absence. Archaeological Debris continues to expand through drawing, sculpture, living materials, digital processes, and installations.