Lachrymatory for Eternal Reinvestment
Wood, glass, 2025
About this work
As an artist working with glass, I’m caught in a cycle of reverence and reckoning. Glass is one of the few materials that can, in theory, be infinitely recycled—yet we rarely treat it that way. The infrastructure to properly recycle glass is fractured, inefficient, and often bypassed entirely. Meanwhile, we continue extracting sand and minerals to produce more “new” glass, feeding a system of waste masked as innovation. This piece mourns that system. The lachrymatory, historically used to collect tears, becomes here a monument to our failure to reinvest—not only our resources, but our care, our attention, our responsibility. The glass drop spilling from the spigot is not just a tear; it is a distillation of our misplaced priorities.
Kris Pitzer
Sculpture, mixed media, fabrication, Philadelphia
I make art that speaks to contradiction—between beauty and waste, permanence and impermanence, reverence and ruin. My practice sits at the uncomfortable intersection of ecological anxiety, personal vulnerability, and the quiet rituals of making. Whether I’m working in glass, metal, or wood, my work is driven by an urgency to confront the systems we’re complicit in—and the ones we create inside ourselves.