Addison Moore

Last night, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) hosted a reception and talk for Professor of Art Michael Kolster’s new book titled “Mongrels of Our Making: The Plastiglomerates of Hawai’i.” The book captures the blending of human activity and the course of the Earth’s geological record through the formation of rock and plastic hybrids called plastiglomerates.

Kolster first learned about the presence of plastiglomerates when he read an article in The New York Times in June 2014. The article referenced a paper published in the Geological Society of America that described how plastic rocks would become a future identifier of human existence, an anthropogenic marker in the geological record. The concept of “future fossils” drew Kolster to these plastiglomerates and eventually shaped his book.

“[It was] interesting to me, not just that they’re going to be fossils, but they’re actually going to be markers of our presence millions of years from now, evidence of environmental change originating in human activity,” Kolster said.

The plastiglomerates featured in Kolster’s book originate from Kamilo Point on the Big Island, Hawaii. The ocean currents bring in high quantities of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to this beach’s shores, making it one of the most polluted beaches in the world.

When people form campfires on this remote beach, some of the plastic burns, melting the plastic into the basalt formed from past volcanic eruptions. When Kolster traveled to Kamilo Beach to photograph these plastiglomerates, he noticed how lava and plastic look and act alike in many ways. Thinking about these parallels, he was inspired to photograph the rocks in what are described as stereo pairs.

“One of the ways I decided to [capture this duality] was with stereo pairs. So I made photographs with two cameras.… What I would do is take two pictures, with the left eye and the right eye, and sometimes they look really much the same, but if you look carefully, there are small differences between them,” Kolster said. “When we look at them through a viewer, we can get our brains to see them in [three dimensions].”

Stereo vision is also used frequently in geological scientific research to take surveys of different kinds of areas, complementing Kolster’s artistic decision to use this photographic technique. In the process, Kolster reflected on the human-nature dichotomy between lava and plastic and how they become one thing. These objects force society to see the natural and artificial world as more than just a binary.

“I love the idea of questioning a little bit of that dichotomy, putting two images up of the same thing from slightly different perspectives, and basically asking, ‘What happens when we view our surroundings and ourselves with both eyes open?’” Kolster said.

Following the talk, Kolster invited panelists to question answers and share how their fields shape their anthropological and scientific understanding of plastiglomerates. Frank Goodyear, co-director of the BCMA, discussed how, before reading the book, he thought the work sought to bring awareness to plastic pollution, but the resulting product was far more complex in its meaning than he originally interpreted it.

“I assumed that there was a larger effort to look at the health of our environment. I came to realize that this is a project that is not meant primarily as a comment on the degradation of our planet but is more a meditation on a whole set of different issues [about society],” Goodyear said.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Willi Lempert spoke about the anthropological implications of plastic’s influence on the environment.

“To me, it speaks to these big questions about nature-culture divides and the human and non-human. It demonstrates how embedded we are—how much and how little power we have over our environment,” Lempert said.

Kolster reflected on these interpretations, offering his perspective as an artist regarding his fascination with the value of these fossils and what they represent rather than photographing them merely to capture beauty.

“When I saw these fossils, I was fascinated at the fact that they had value that was more than just them being tossed away,” Kolster said. “I’m thinking about these things because they are fascinating, because they tell us something about our moment.”

Asher Savel ’26, a student in Kolster’s class, left the talk wondering about how humans construct the world around them and how we can reject the human-nature dichotomy in other aspects of our lives.

“His book asks us to reject the dichotomy that we built of nature and the built world and asks us to consider something new that resembles a whole look at not only our actions of the past but how we can live in a constructed future,” Savel said.