Excrescence: the promise of growth is an ongoing investigation of the relationship of preservation between nature and humans. It is a collection of forms made by casting molten glass on wood. The two materials, glass and plant, imprint one another in equal measure; this is both a sculpture and printmaking process. 

Excrescence questions what we consider ‘natural’. Concurrent with the development of her direct-casting process, Waugh has been steeping in the scholarship of vegetal theory— the two practices now inform one another. This collection of sculptures encourages us to consider, and reconsider through the lens of plant life, growth, excess, potential, survival. We live in a time of anthropocene crisis; humans alter the environment, the environment alters humans, and preservation is inherently mutual because we are nature. 

“The vegetal event is that which is ongoing (I do not wish to confine it to a process), abiding in all its finitude, devoid of a fixed and final outcome, much like our own existence. It maintains fidelity to its source. In a word, it is the event of and as growth.”

Michael Marder, What’s planted in the Event? On the Secret Life of a Philosophical Concept