Streptomyces: An Exhibition by MiNHi England (Upcoming)
On View March 6-May 9, 2026
Exhibition Statement
Streptomyces is the name of a genus of soil-dwelling bacteria that has become one of the most important sources of antibiotics. The word itself carries layers of meaning, from the Greek streptós (“twisted”) and múkēs (“fungus”). Found throughout the earth, Streptomyces thrive in soil and decaying vegetation. Their remarkable metabolism allows them to break down complex organic matter and, in doing so, produce compounds that humans have turned into life-saving medicines including antibiotics, antifungals, and chemotherapy agents. In other words, they transform decay into cure.
I am drawn to the paradox of this organism: its byproducts serve as powerful weapons against cancer, yet in doing so, they also bring harm to the very body they are meant to heal.
This tension mirrors my own experience of loss. After my husband’s death from cancer, I was left with the sterile vocabulary of treatment protocols, a language designed to explain but never to console. These documents remain as relics of a time when life was measured in treatment cycles, side effects, and statistical risk. They are at once cold and strangely intimate, describing in clinical terms the disease that lived in my home, in my marriage, and in my daily rituals of care. They became artifacts of that time, echoing like a voice I could no longer hear. I return to these texts not to make sense of them, but to acknowledge the impossibility of sense, and to sit with their twisted overlap of cure and poison, hope and devastation.
Grief, like Streptomyces, is a kind of metabolism. It breaks down and reshapes everything it touches. The spores shed into my daily life through subconscious gestures, sentimental objects I cannot release, in my dreams where he still appears, and in my body’s reflexes of fear, anxiety, and survival. The truth of what happened is not static but distorted, refracted through memory and coping mechanisms that bend reality just enough to let me endure it. My work inhabits this space of distortion, with mirrors that shift perspective, anatomical forms that hover between beauty and decay, and imagery composed of overlapping text. These are not representations of grief so much as reflections of how grief alters perception itself.
Streptomyces becomes, for me, a metaphor for survival. Just as these bacteria transform decay into life-saving compounds, I am compelled to transform loss into form, memory into material. My art does not resolve grief or make it smaller. Instead, it acknowledges grief as a permanent condition, one that metabolizes the past into the present and reshapes me as much as any organism is reshaped by its environment. This exhibition is both a record of that process and a continuation of it, twisted, complex, and alive in its contradictions.
Artist Bio
MiNHi England is an independent artist and educator who works primarily in glass. Born in Germany and raised in upstate New York, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University, School of Art and Design, with a concentration in glassblowing and metal casting. She now lives in Seattle, WA, where she owns and operates Top Hat Glassworks, a collaborative studio that supports emerging and early-career glass artists.
In her practice, MiNHi explores major life experiences and transitions, using glass, neon, and other illuminated elements to give form to contemporary existential themes. Her work examines the complexity of emotion through repeated forms, reflective surfaces, and figurative gestures. By incorporating mirrored distortions and shifting light, she reveals how inner turbulence and recurring patterns in life can shape, and sometimes distort, our sense of self.
England’s work has been collected and featured throughout the United States, including Bellevue Art Museum, Habatat Galleries Glass International, and SeaTac Airport. In 2023, she was featured in American Craft Magazine's "Remembering Well" edition, recognizing her work in grief through glass. After earning runner-up on the hit television series, “Blown Away,” she has made appearances as a public figure and glass artist around the nation and internationally and she continues to travel as an educator in the arts.
Artist’s Website: www.Minhi.cm
Artist’s Instagram: @m.i.n.h.i
