In 2017 and 2018, I spent a lot of time picking up garbage from local beaches. Often these were family walks, and my people got tired of my constant scanning and stooping to collect.
I started to think of each collection as a diary of a walk. At the same time, I was researching marine debris, the great garbage patch, and plastiglomerates–the world’s first human-nature hybrid rock.
It was a challenge for me to not “rainbow” each fossil as I formed it from discards and hot glue. I wanted to step back from my tendency to beautify and allow for these objects to be ugly.
These Future Fossils are a speculative fiction: I was imagining that they would be found on Santa Cruz beaches in 50 or 100 or more years, like plastiglomerates were discovered on Kamilo Beach on the Big Island of Hawai’i in 2006. As climate change intensifies and the petro-plastics industry digs in and expands its production, that’s where we’re headed.