Cain and Abel
2018This project considers the relative value of plant-based and animal-based materials and the concept of replacement. Two natural history museum-style display boxes contain charming but uncanny specimens: a flock of lamb cakes and a vegetable lamb. The lamb cakes, an Easter tradition, stand in for a costly real sacrificial lamb with the more affordable sugar-and-flour version, while the legendary "vegetable lamb of Tartary" is revealed to be a cotton plant, yielding a plant-based fiber that has largely replaced animal-based wool for textiles worldwide. Both replicas are in turn made of plastic, a petroleum-based material that has made cheap replicas of expensive goods available on a mass scale.
Plastic flowers and leaves, acrylic paint, latex paint, expandable foam, acrylic modeling paste, polyfill, acrylic (plexiglass), wood