Ani Liu's Art Exposes Microplastics in Breast Milk and Motherhood's Future

Ani Liu is the Carrafiell Assistant Professor (Emerging Design) at the Weitzman School.

When she joined the faculty of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design in the fall of 2021, Ani Liu was creating multimedia works that examined the effects that emerging technologies have on people's lives and communities. Liu, the Carrafiell Assistant Professor (Emerging Design) in the Department of Fine Arts, is teaching Creative Research, a course that breaks down fine arts research into modules including observation, documentation, the scientific gaze, archives, and data visualization.

She considers how artists conduct research and the question of research itself. "What is research? What is knowledge? How is knowledge produced?" she asks. "How is the knowledge that artists and designers create different from, say, what a physicist creates, or a mathematician, economist, or historian? Part of this course is trying to answer these questions through exploring research from different angles."

Motherhood features predominantly in her art, which is currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. "At some point I realized parenthood is my reality now, and I needed to make it work. Being a little bit nerdy, I couldn't help but also intellectualize motherhood, and research it like any other topic," Liu says.

"In the last few years, I have also been conducting research and making work around microplastics. In this day and age, we all have microplastics in our body, in our blood, in our brain, literally every part of our bodies," she say. "A few years ago, I read a paper about how researchers in Italy had found microplastics in breast milk, which shocked me. And I thought, would I be able to reproduce their findings in my own body? For the last year and a half, I've been distilling microplastics out of my breast milk, with a goal of making a sculptural installation about the experience."

Read more at Weitzman News.