Plastic Eater: Wax Worm
2018 Dec.
Art Weaving Festival / co-exhibition
@Miaoli Former Train Station
2018 Art Weaving Festival is taking place at Miaoli City featuring traditional skills with an exhibition, workshop inside the old Miaoli train station. The exhibition focuses on displaying the 3 domains of tradition weaving skills in Miaoli City, which includes bamboo weaving, straw weaving and tribal weaving from indigenous culture. Furthermore, the exhibition display contemporary artist' works combining old techniques with unconventional materials and form as an interpretation of crafts art.
Plastic Eater Project
Plastic eater project intend to uncover human beings' consumption of plastic bags by crocheting newly discovered organism that decompose plastic bags such as wax worms.
In addition, with viewers participation by "feeding" their own unused plastic bags, the project tends to put participants into action to reducing wastes. This Also remind audience to be conscious of their own behavior of consumption. Besides, the action collects artist's crochet materials.
Wax worms could save the world?
Wax worms are the caterpillar larvae of wax moths. In 2017, scientists have discovered that wax worms can eat plastic bags. Wax worms get their names because they live on the wax in bee hives. Like plastic, wax is a polymer, which consists of a long string of carbon atoms held together, with other atoms branching off the sides of the chain. Both wax and the polyethylene in plastic bag had a similar carbon backbone.
Material:
waste plastic bag yarn, textile waste