‘When you touch plastic, you touch yourself’: material and self in the work of Senga Nengudi

This article traces and analyses Senga Nengudi’s use of plastic as a medium in her sculpture and performance of the late 1960s and 1970s. Plastic reappears constantly throughout Nengudi’s oeuvre, a choice most often passed over as merely an economic or logistical one, plastic being both cheap and ubiquitous. In this article, I push against this too-easy explanation, arguing that while it might have started as a material of convenience and low cost, plastic became the medium by which Nengudi could articulate evolving attitudes towards the body. In her earliest work, plastic appears as a playful material, facilitating physical interaction with her viewers, or ‘activators’, as she often described them. But after years working with plastics, Nengudi also embraced the metaphorical implications of the material, recognizing that the qualities that facilitated viewer engagement could also communicate her own corporeal and psychic experience.