Cattle Glass
Amira Chowyuk
Bioplastic
2025

CATTLE GLASS is a material investigation into gelatin as both an everyday industrial ingredient and a charged ecological and cultural substance. Extracted from collagen in animal skin, bone, and tissue, gelatin circulates through farming, abattoirs, and manufacturing systems, appearing invisibly in foods, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals for its foaming and clarifying properties. In this project, clarity becomes both a material and ethical pursuit: to produce “glass,” the foam must be removed. Drawing conceptual lineage from Thornton Dial’s Lost Cows (2001), an assemblage meditation on labor, rural life, and the cycle of life and death. CATTLE GLASS engages cattle flesh and bone as material, memory, and labor. Sourced in dialogue with Black and Black Farms in Alabama, the work reflects on ranching as inherited knowledge, sustained effort, and care. The making process mirrors this ethic: ingredients must be carefully sourced, proportioned, monitored, and transformed. As gelatin becomes glass-like, the project asks viewers to consider what is clarified, what is erased, and what remains embedded—of bodies, labor, spirit, and the unseen histories behind a ubiquitous material.