you chose copper? JS: Yes. I've been thinking about nature-culture recently ? well, I don't really like the simplicity of that dichotomy. But there's something about materials like copper, woods, stone, trees, shells. You walk outside and these materials are part of the world before we touched anything. There's a feeling of pleasure that many of us have in materials that have some presence before us, like clay and wood and copper. Yet the plastic bottle in this piece ? it's made from oil. It's also part of the world before we touched anything; it's just as natural as the copper is. And you know, I really love plastic. There are different kinds of pleasure embedded in that material. Q: What do you like about plastic? A: It's a kind of fantasy material. It's completely malleable. In this work, all of these pieces of plastic are formed by molds in factories. Somebody invented the mold, most often to imitate some other material that came before it. So the plastic bottle mold looks like old glass bottles. And this piece of plastic ? Q: It looks like a crisper lid, in a refrigerator. A: Yeah, it could be something like that. All of these textures and details on it, they're entirely invented. It's not like its form came from some quality of the material that dictates how we work it. Q: Right, it's totally obedient. A: And plastic is very, very inexpensive and very present ? it's everywhere. I haven't used