Early last year, Liz Larner intercepted three bales of compressed bottles and other plastic containers and had them delivered to the yard behind her studio. These giant, writhing, disgusting masses – each squatting on a wooden pallet – cost her little more than the price of delivery. Larner has long been drawn to ambivalent, even malignant materials, which she refashions into sculptures that are often transcendently beautiful. In her early ‘Culture’ pieces, she combined ingredients in Petri dishes and left them to their own fungal devices. Whipped Cream, Heroin and Salmon Eggs (1987) was one. A Cough and the Bottom of My Shoe (1987) was another. Over the past decade, much of her output has been in the form of heavy clay slabs, vertically oriented and fixed to the wall. These slabs are themselves kinds of Petri dishes, often bearing scattered stones, minerals or kiln-melted glass, sealed under an artificial agar of thick clear epoxy. (It looks like glaze, but it’s plastic.) (Source: DesignBoom)