As a first-generation immigrant artist, Jean Shin reclaims discarded materials as a metaphor for environmental repair and social healing, alchemizing these accumulations into potent sculptures and monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity, and community engagement.

Through this lens, mother-of-pearl buttons reveal a powerful and cautionary ecological narrative. Harvested from mollusks that once filtered waterways clean but are now gravely endangered, these 19th-century luxury items were eventually displaced by plastic-and tossed away en masse.

Tidal Orbs (2025) relates to Shin's ongoing advocacy around freshwater mussels and their crucial role in river ecologies. This suspended sculpture repurposes three blown glass orbs from Shin's 2022 Freshwater installation, a soaring public fountain commissioned by Philadelphia Contemporary. In Freshwater, thirty such glass containers housed lab-bred live mussels that filtered polluted water. Before being piped back into the Delaware River, the clean water poured onto a bed of glistening unused vintage buttons, in a luminous sculptural encounter inviting contemplation of waterways' environmental transformation.

In Tidal Orbs, this glass now contains thousands of milky, iridescent mother-of-pearl buttons diverted from landfill, creating a dialogue between vessels that once nurtured living filter feeders and now memorialize their organic relatives, and bridging laboratory conservation efforts with material culture and overconsumption. Each orb turns industrial debris into a testament for resilience- honoring lost natural filtration services while celebrating ongoing restoration efforts.