______________________________________________________ BOWDOIN JOURNAL OF ART, 2021 Mold in Art: Affect, Abjection, and Ambiguity EILEEN CHUNG Colby College, Class of 2022 ABSTRACT Mold is a living organism that has always repelled humans; yet, artists have explored its aesthetic potential long since seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still lifes. Our predecessors have taught us that mold is saprogenic and pathogenic and that we should avoid it. As an abject object of fear, mold is understood as an external threat to our inner harmony, and worse, our corporeal existence. But this does not explain why artists have represented or used mold in their work, even often aestheticizing it. Contemporary artists are particularly enthralled by mold’s conflicting “attraction and repulsion,” as they explore its ambiguous nature. Mold, then, is perhaps not as horrifying as humans purport it to be. This paper is concerned with how artists have made sense of humans’ ambivalence toward mold. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, along with Estelle Barrett’s reinterpretation of her theory for contemporary art, this paper considers the co-existence of “attraction and repulsion” and their implications on artistic creation. 1 Introduction Mold has established its presence in the history of art, its significance changing according to shifting contexts. Yet, mold is barely mentioned in artistic discourses. The lack of scholarship dedicated to exploring the 1 I wish to thank Professor Véronique Plesch, who first introduced me to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The first version of this paper was written in Professor Plesch’s seminar Food in Art, Food as Art, taught at Colby College in the Spring of 2020. Professor Plesch has continued to provide mentorship while I revised this paper for submission to the Bowdoin Journal of Art.