Becoming Glasswort draws from ancestral knowledge, plant intelligence, and interspecies collaboration. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea that plants are "our oldest teachers," the series turns to the glasswort plant native to my ancestral island — an enduring species that thrives in salt marshes, sustaining biodiversity and cultural memory alike. Once crucial to Croatia's historic glassmaking traditions, glasswort becomes both medium and metaphor. Like glasswort metabolizing salt to nourish its ecosystem, these works metabolize inherited stories and practices into blueprints for survival in uncertain futures.
At the heart of Becoming Glasswort is the quilt There Are Two / Dvi Su, hand-stitched by my grandmother in 1946 on linen woven by my grandfather. Using LiDAR scanning and AI, I research the quilt's lost embroidery techniques — recovering ancestral knowledge embedded in the stitches themselves. This recovered knowledge then moves across media: fine art prints serve as sketches for textiles and biomedia works, translating what the quilt teaches into contemporary form. Threads become fiber-mnemonics — conduits for transmitting knowledge across generations, much like fiber-optic cables carrying light and data. This entanglement of text, textile, and technology reflects a philosophy of continuous weaving — contextus — where storytelling, memory, and materiality intersect. Becoming Glasswort reclaims feminine ancestral practices as an act of radical futurism — both cultural preservation and an emergent technology for future-making.
