Emma Bautista

Invisible Neighbors, 2023
Textile waste, discarded plastic, miscellaneous trash, acrylic paint, resin, 36 x 84 in.

A milieu of textile waste, shopping bags, discarded objects picked from the curb, and other plastic and common trash set an imaginative marine-scape of New York's underwater ecologies to reflect at once the diversity of life and the mindsets of disposability around water. How different these beings are from ourselves, how invisible they are to us through the saline murk and algal blooms--marine life is at once the bearer of significant human harm and largely illegible and uncharismatic to us. This work aims to enliven connections and care for local marine life and nurture intimacy with the water as part of our home. This project was created with support from the Office of Sustainability and NYU 2040 Now to collectively envision a climate-neutral institution and city and enact this dream today.

Emma Bautista is a Filipinx-American interdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and sustainable fashion designer born and based in New York. Their creative practice centers multispecies entanglement and art-making as acts of healing, loving, and resistance. Up against extractivist systems and relationships to spirited entities and landscapes as disposable, they often repurpose and transform trash intercepted from landfill for their work. Their mixed media sculptures and paintings, interactive installations that invite other-than-human collaborations and care, and poetic storytelling stem from an acknowledgment that power and its agendas of control and mastery construct bodies as one thing or the other, contiguous or isolated, and they seek to enliven more thoughtful ways of being in the world. In subverting the broad acceptance of these hierarchies and borderlines as essential truths, Bautista's work explores potentials for urgently expansive kinships and insists on futures of radical love.