Marie Catalano is a writer, curator, and educator based in New York. She has taught theory and writing in the Studio Art Department at New York University. Previously, Catalano was a partner at JTT in New York, and an associate at Adams and Ollman in Portland, Oregon.
Meech Boakye
The Big Ferment
by Marie Catalano
ed. by Lumi Tan
May 16, 2026
Mermaids have always belonged to the borderlands. Whether as seductive sirens, cunning tricksters, or deviant monsters, they resurface across mythologies as hybrid figures that embody survival in their very form: multispecies beings adaptable to both air and water, made for more than one world, thriving in the space between. The transformative potential of mermaids has lately offered artist and researcher Meech Boakye a generative framework for imagining how to sustain life in inhospitable environments and amid crisis. Drawing on folklore, ancestral knowledge, and material histories, Boakye’s fluid practice cultivates ecologies across scales and timelines: in the slow growth of gardens, the decay of compost piles, the sharing of meals, ephemeral sculptures, cosmological installations, and gatherings among strangers. These worlds are deeply sensorial: to experience them, you almost always have to get your hands dirty.
Drawing on artist and filmmaker Tiare Ribeaux’s Bioplastic Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes, Boakye experiments with making their own materials, gaining an intimate knowledge of their histories in the process. In Boakye’s weathering (2024), six bricks cast from soap lie on the floor in a row. Their varied colors and textures — green, beige, white, translucent, smooth, and granular — reflect both natural and synthetic ingredients Boakye used in their making, including sea clay, plant powders, goat’s milk, and glycerin. Glycerin, essential to soap and bioplastics, has a fraught history: during World War II, American housewives were called upon to retain cooking fats for glycerin production for weaponry and explosives. An italicized “please” appears on the top brick and degrades in legibility across the others, interrupted by colorful rocks embedded during the casting process — eroding construction materials collected from Tommy Thompson Park, a thriving site of biodiversity built atop a landfill near the University of Toronto where Boakye studied. Boakye’s cured bricks invite us to consider the role cleanliness plays in our built environment. From the sublime landscapes of Romantic era painters and ideologies of Manifest Destiny to the contemporary Clean Girl aesthetic, notions of natural purity have long served to justify colonial extraction and reinforce racialized, gendered, and ableist classifications. As Alexis Shotwell argues in Against Purity, this ideal is an illusion: “[T]here is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover.” Instead, we are inextricably entangled, with dirt on our hands: “Being continuous with everything on earth is a starting point for critical inquiry… that we are co-constituted and thus polluted and impure hails us to make continually contingent and unsettled decisions about how to be in relation to the world, with no predetermined answer.” 1
In a series of conversations about the rhetoric of purity used when discussing “invasive” species, Boakye and collaborator Christina Kingsbury proposed the term “transplant thinking” as a way to reframe adaptive regeneration enacted by beings displaced against their will. In 2021, these discussions culminated in a co-created ritual healing entitled Afterwords along the banks of the Eramosa River, in Guelph, Ontario, a former dumping ground now teeming with weeds. Leading a group of participants, Boakye and Kingsbury walked along the river at night, harvesting buckthorn berries and coating mullein in beeswax to make hag’s tapers that provided firelight. Over shared reflections on the land’s compromised state, the group presented offerings to the site. Even as transplants pose a threat to biodiversity, they perform a kind of caretaking by holding toxic waste in place. The project’s subsequent installation at the Art Gallery of Guelph presented traces of these encounters along the river: a poem written in berry ink, a field guide, a foraging map, and fixings for seed carrier bags, which visitors were invited to assemble and return to the earth as gifts. Through these gestures, Boakye and Kingsbury invite others to engage in “transplant thinking” as a way to confront the intertwined forces of oppression and ecological exploitation, embracing entanglement as a condition of survival.
For Boakye, material transformation and sensory experience in community with others serve as powerful relational tools. Since 2023, they have co-organized, alongside Jade Novarino, Lauren Johnson, and Ivy Doxtator, Garlic Fest, an annual public gathering held in collaboration with local farmers, artists, and chefs on urban microfarms in Portland, Oregon, where they are based. On a late summer evening, participants share in a potluck of garlicky dishes, meet local farmers and sample their produce, taste and record notes on different garlic varieties, collect printed artist editions and zines, make garlic-related crafts and drawings, and convene over performances, live music, garlic piñatas, and painted photobooths. Conceived as a community potluck and inspired by Les Blanc’s 1980 documentary film Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and its footage of the lively Gilroy Garlic Festival, Garlic Fest draws on lineages of community gatherings rooted in a shared love of food. In doing so, Boakye and their collaborators respond to urgent questions about the role of the artist in today’s society, turning to acts of ritual care in community: growing, preparing, and sharing food as embodied acknowledgments of interdependence with our own bodies, other species, and each other.
Back at the fermentation workshop, our group grows intrigued by the strange materiality of bioplastic. We want to make more, so we pour one big expansive sheet and fill it with translucent seaweeds, algae pigments, and leftover vegetables. Once set, several of us carry it ceremoniously to the window where it clings to the glass, filtering the late summer light. We sit back to admire this suspended universe. Like mermaids, transplants remake the conditions for living where life has been made difficult. Through Boakye’s sensorial environments, we might reconsider the work of regeneration as inseparable from healing — an act of tending to our entanglements, making space for life to return in unexpected forms.
- Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, (University of Minnesota Press, 2016/2021): 4, 10.
