Martha Poggioli
The Bug
June 21 - August 15, 2026
An installation-in-process developed over the course of her month-long residency at lower_cavity, Martha Poggioli’s The Bug reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in themes of emergence and transformation across the domains of technology, biology, and materiality. Poggioli posits the decaying post-industrial architecture of lower_cavity as a festering and fecund laboratory; a subterranean research facility in which plant, animal, prosthetic, and unliving forms coalesce. The project is informed in part by Poggioli’s research into buckthorn, an invasive plant abundant in western Massachusetts whose berries were used to produce a sap-green ink in pre-modern Europe. Brewing her own ink from buckthorn foraged from local nature preserves, Poggioli moves from luminous works on paper to an expansive sculptural installation that operates in an uneasy zone between the grown and the manufactured.
