Ron Shaull

Infrastructure #1 | Handmade cornhusk paper with pigmented abaca grid overlay, cotton string, pigmented abaca and cotton pulp, hemlock and boxwood roots, 2024

This three-dimensional work represents the layers of natural and man-made infrastructure that support life on Earth in the 21st century. A blue abaca grid on corn husk paper represents the crystalline geology of our planet. Hemlock and boxwood roots mimic the capillary highways that carry nutrients back and forth between the Earth and the inner systems of plant and animal life, including us. Cotton string, dredged in wet plant fiber, dries in the linear patterns of our made environment – streets, bridges, sewer lines, data cables, etc. – the crisscrossing, over-and-under infrastructure of commerce, perched precariously on the infrastructure that sustains it.

I retired in 2018 after 25 years in communications and marketing at OSU Wexner Medical Center.