Enriched U

Bryce Benton – Enriched U (2026) Air plants, succulents, Trader Joe’s salad packaging, salvaged book page, USB-C and Apple charging cables

In Enriched U, Bryce Benton weaves a tangle of living and obsolete systems into a fragile, suspended ecosystem. A page from a children’s book about the Three Mile Island disaster—its lesson on enriched uranium—rests inside a clear plastic salad container, surrounded by air plants and succulents that cling like feathers to wire. Red-and-white cords, a USB-C, and an aging Apple cable twist through the greenery, suggesting both lifeline and umbilical, signal and root.

The work hovers somewhere between reliquary and nest, its bird-like form sheltering a wounded text while quietly reclaiming it. Benton transforms waste materials and fading technologies into a breathing archive, where electricity and chlorophyll share the same pulse.

Linked to the ReLeaf Wishing Well, Enriched U extends an ethic of mutual care—proceeds supporting artist Calder Kamin, who accompanied Benton when the book was rescued from Austin Public Library’s Recycled Reads. Within this cycle of reuse and reciprocity, the piece asks what it means to enrich not by extraction but by attention, tenderness, and flight.