What We Gathered
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, freshwater mussels from Midwestern rivers, including the Mississippi, Ohio, and White River systems, were harvested on an industrial scale to supply the American mother-of-pearl button industry. Beginning in the 1890s, button factories lining the Mississippi River processed millions of shells annually, producing vast quantities of pearl buttons for the expanding ready-to-wear clothing market.
The demand for nacre, the iridescent inner layer of many mollusk shells, led to the extraction of tens of millions of pounds of mussels from Midwestern waterways each year. Intensive harvesting methods, such as dragging “crowfoot” hooks along riverbeds, rapidly depleted mussel beds that once carpeted miles of river bottom. Rivers including the Mississippi and Ohio experienced dramatic population declines that continue to affect mussel communities today.
Freshwater mussels are vital ecosystem engineers; as filter feeders, they improve water quality, stabilize sediments, and provide habitat for other aquatic organisms. Today, a number of freshwater mussels species are already extinct while others are rare or endangered, threatened by historic over-harvesting, dam construction, pollution, and habitat loss.
This sculpture references that extractive history. Handmade porcelain shells drilled like button blanks accumulate within a sweater form, linking clothing, one of the industries that drove this harvest, to the ecological cost embedded within everyday materials.