Tayler Steadman - 2024

Artist's Statement

My project is a manta ray crocheted out of respun yarn. It is approximately the size of a manta pup after birth, three feet across. Adults measure around 22 feet. This project was inspired by the film Racing Extinction in which an Indonesian village, Lamakera, is explored for its brutal efficiency in killing these creatures.The mantas are killed almost purely for their gills, which in China are believed to have traditional medicinal purposes. Mantas are killed for their gills and then trashed, wasting up to thousands of pounds of meat. The red dollar signs on the project are meant to cover the “usable” space of a manta ray and demonstrate how little need there is to murder these beautiful creatures. The mantas of Lamakera will be gone in only a few years, but the people have no other source of income and therefore keep backing themselves into an inescapable, irreversible corner. This situation is a small scale representation of what is happening on Earth. In both cases, something needs to change NOW, or mantas won’t be the only beings to disappear from this planet.