MONICA C. LoCASCIO

When They Find Our Fossils

“When they find our fossils, I want them to find something that matters.”

What begins as maleable, intimate, and embodied becomes geological: frozen in time, preserved as a relic, made sacred through its survival. LoCascio’s new body of work emerges from the tension between hope for the future and the grief of feeling that it may already be too late. Her experience of motherhood unfolds alongside a profound sense of ecological mourning and a fear of an increasingly AI-mediated future, in which embodied forms of knowledge become estranged from our understanding of what it means to be alive.

This tension brings the intimate scale of the body and inherited memory into relation with the vastness of deep time. Floods, flourishing organisms, and bubbling organs take shape as soft crocheted structures made from salvaged antique silk and organic cotton, that flow over and through frames of scrap metal. Through mineral and biological processes, these organic forms are transformed into stone and crystals—materials that evoke both fossilization, energetic potential, and survival. With this series, she imagines how life might flourish out of the Anthropocene, and offers them as talismans and invocations for hopeful futures.