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Images of Tangled Currents in progress, February & March 2025
Tangled Currents
MFA Thesis Exhibition
Joseph Gross Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
April 23 - May 16, 2025
Tangled Currents uses eight historic landfills along the Santa Cruz River in Tucson as a framework to examine the sustained consequences of human activity on a local ecosystem. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the City of Tucson operated landfills directly along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. Filled in or built over, the landfills are hidden reminders of the relentless human impact on the environment, some even threatening to upend efforts to revitalize the river.
Each of the sculptures in Tangled Currents represents one of these sites and offers a speculative solution for their remediation. Arranged in a loose map, the forms are scaled to represent the shape and depth of the respective landfills. Reishi fruiting bodies (Ganoderma lucidum) twist and bend from each of the sculpture’s sections. Like a web of roots, the mushrooms make visible the unseen network binding the sculptures together.
Eight drawings accompany the sculptures and pull from various sources related to the monitoring of landfills, including maps, contamination prediction models, and scientific diagrams. Layered within are hand-drawn interpretations of the microscopic mycelial systems painted with collected reishi spores. The abstracted marks oscillate between the micro and the macro to encompass the complexities of human and non-human relationships, creating an opportunity to reflect on our implicit participation in both.
Reishi fungal networks can clean toxins from soil and water through mycoremediation. As one member in a greater ecosystem, mycelium secretes enzymes that can break down toxins and plant matter, helping revitalize the soil and make space for new life. Mycelium has evolved reciprocal relationships with other organisms to increase their collective chance of survival, in contrast to humans, who have created stark separations between ourselves and the natural world. Mycelium’s inherent processes unveil alternative ways of existence that move away from the anthropogenic perspective.
Tangled Currents presents human-nonhuman partnerships as a way toward a more sustainable and symbiotic future. It suggests an alternative to human-centered ways of thinking by examining natural processes for guidance in developing a mutually beneficial world.