Amalgam, germinated from a trove of colorful plastic shards that I gathered one afternoon about 5 years ago while visiting the Oregon coast. The ever-present, man-made debris was even more ubiquitous that spring, having crossed the ocean on currents carrying wreckage from the tsunami that had hit the northeastern coast of Japan in 2011. I was captivated by the turbulent weavings of fishing line, foam, driftwood, kelp, and household plastics, that regularly emerged at low tide. Amalgam aspires to embody the chaos and intricacy of those transfigured objects. A jumbled framework of bones and driftwood have been erratically entwined by methods drawn from net making, basketry, and needle lace, to balance suggestions of random formation against indications of human industry and agency. The tightly lashed clusters of plastic reflect the intermittent patches of seaweed, and the accretion of barnacles, that overwhelm the surfaces of all types of floating debris.