These sculptures won't solve plastic pollution, but the material they're made of could definitely help

Inside a small gallery in New York's Lower East Side, sitting on a short platform built from dirt, visitors will find a curious series of sculptures by the Montreal-based artist Kelly Jazvac. Swirling, frilled and folded like mushrooms or fossils, the sculptures' shapes are certainly peculiar. But what's most interesting about the artworks is what they're made of.

The three small sculptures — the largest about the size of a baseball glove — displayed at Fierman gallery were created using two very different kinds of plastics. One part is PVC, which is ubiquitous and known as the most toxic plastic for the environment and for our health, while the other part is polyhydroxybutyrate, or PHB, a non-toxic, fully compostable biopolymer that's made by bacteria.

The artist, who's also a member of the interdisciplinary research group the Synthetic Collective, is widely known for her work concerning plastic pollution. Jazvac was investigating sustainable building practices in Mexico when she was introduced to Carlos Filipe Peña Malacara's lab at the Instituto de Biotechnología at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, where the revolutionary material is being studied.

Peña Malacara's team uses the bacteria Azotobacter vinelandii, which can be found in waters and soils around the world, to produce PHB. The microorganism synthesizes the plastic as an energy store much like fat in the human body, the artist says. The lab cultivates the bacteria from food waste, feeds it to maximize yield, then extracts the plastic, which can be processed into various formats, including films, granules and filaments for 3D printing. The material could see wide commercial application as a sustainable replacement for single-use plastics, like wrappers and packaging, the artist says.

Jazvac describes the material in its raw form as "honey-beige" in colour, rigid and light. It feels similar to polyethylene, like a plastic bottle, but "more organic than petrochemical," she says.

The samples that appear in the exhibition — with their scrunchy, brain-like forms — exemplify the raw product that follows extraction. The artist mimicked its curves and contours by folding, scoring, cutting and sewing the PVC components, which she salvaged from billboards advertising development projects.

"What [the sculptures] produce is a momentary confusion between the organic and the synthetic," the artist says. 

The combination of the two very different plastics was "electric" for her. "There's something about seeing the business-as-usual, toxic way of doing something contrasted with this quiet, beautiful, elegant system of making a similar material without toxicity."

The plinth on which the sculptures rest is made from rammed earth, an ancient and environmentally friendly construction technique using compacted soil. The results can be as strong as concrete. With the platform standing just a foot off the floor, "all the energy in the gallery is asking you to look down," the artist explains. "I like to think that the bacteria is actually in that earth as well."

The exhibition is titled Five Million Trillion Trillion after the estimated population of bacteria living on Earth right now. The name both marvels at the unimaginable size of that number and considers what other wondrous things the organisms could do.

"I feel like in my work and research there's a lot of gloom and doom, but in art there can be this really inspiring sense of possibility," Jazvac says. "What can be otherwise? And for me, that's the punch of what art brings to this: a creative reimagining of other ways that things could be."

Kelly Jazvac's Five Million Trillion Trillion is on view at Fierman in New York City through Aug. 10.