One doesn’t often mull over the slight curve of a garlic shell or the blush of an apple peel. “Decompositions,” an exhibit at Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery featuring Nancy Macko, invites viewers to do just that. Through 35 photographs of her kitchen compost bin, Macko transforms mundane vegetable waste into abstract, striking scenes, amplifying the beauty of overlooked forms and textures.
Hailing from New York, Macko has been a Scripps faculty member for nearly 38 years. She is a former chair of both Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies, as well as the Director of the Scripps Digital Art Program.
Early in her career at Scripps, she began developing her art practice, culminating in her first collection “Hive Universe.” Feminism and spirituality converged in a queer, feminine, grandiose world based on bees. Macko created a matriarchal society that transcended the prejudice faced by queer women.
“The hive is the utopian lesbian society, where [there] is a queen bee and all the worker bees are her daughters,” Macko said.
As she learned more about the climate crisis and plight of bees, she realized their struggle mirrors the way the world treats women. This revelation pushed her towards more confrontational and realistic works, including “Decompositions,” which embodies ecofeminism. The movement links the exploitation of women and nature, arguing that both are oppressed by the same patriarchal system.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Nancy’s world “physically shrunk,” leaving her with few subjects to photograph. Macko turned to an unlikely subject: the organic scraps in her kitchen compost bin.
Accompanied by her wife Jan Blair, whom she affectionately calls “the curator of the bin,” Macko photographed cooking scraps in a small plastic box on their kitchen countertop, giving life to “Decompositions.” Macko displays the small and unassuming to create worlds saturated with meaning and power.
“I was interested in using a macro lens to climb into plants and see it more abstractly,” Macko said.
A macro lens allowed her to work with very small focusing distances, taking sharp, comprehensive images of small subjects. Her approach is reminiscent of the work of Edward Weston, with whom she is compared in the exhibition book.
Dr. Erin M. Curtis, the exhibit’s curator, compares Macko’s work to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias: spaces described as “other.”
“[Foucault ultimately] revealed the infinite possibilities of the everyday, the discoveries that await those who seek,” Curtis said.
Corn husks, garlic shells, apple peels, carrot tops, parsley stems — in Macko’s lens, her compost bin becomes extraordinary. Bathed in rich amounts of sunlight and colored with inky shadows, the waste — suggestive of fabric — flutters and bends with a refined beauty and grace.
Through the bubbles, slight scratches on the side of the bin and layered darkness from constant use and abuse, Macko compels viewers to confront the reality of imperfection, and find its innate beauty. The uncleaned bin becomes a cycle: waste breaks apart before it renews.
The close-up of decaying fruits and vegetables throughout invited viewers to project their own images and emotions.
“Tidepool with Sea Lions” is a muted, hazy scene comprised of creatures and old plants.
“My father used to build fish tank landscapes … it reminds me of that,” Beatrice Woodward PZ ’28 said. “[It looks like] an oil spill, a jellyfish, [I see] tentacles and water.”
Macko references the artists, patterns, movements and inspirations in her titles. A lettuce leaf that ripples as if it were a blanket, for example, becomes “Odalisque,” a nod to the recurring nineteenth-century Orientalist painting figure: a naked woman erotically laying on a bed for a male viewer.
On a wittier note, “Garlic Wings Nebula” resembles clouds and storm systems captured in satellite images. “Still Life (After Caravaggio)” and “Push Pull (For de Kooning)” pay homage to their namesake artists. The former captures the gradient transition from white to black in rotting corn, while the latter’s use of color— saturated, violent reds and oranges — creates a gripping tension in its depiction of decaying fruits.
Macko is continuing to shoot “Decompositions,” saying she would always be “discovering new things” from her compost bin. Her upcoming body of work titled “War” will focus on mostly coffee grounds, which she says are “broken down and decomposing… horrible [and] great stuff.”
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