Commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts and the BioScience Research Center at Rice University. Inspired by the hydra organisms used in Rice University biologist Jacob Robinson’s research. Hydra organisms are valuable to scientists because they can regenerate asexually and almost endlessly. Hydra organisms are named after the mythological hydra that guarded the border between the land of the living and the dead who sprouted a new head every time one was severed. “Hydras”, the image-object sculpture shown here, responds to the organism’s remarkable reproducibility via scanning a deflated mylar birthday balloon, turning it into a digital image, enlarging that image, then printing the image on multiple sheets of silk organza gathered and hung on top of each other. The strings on the left are from the original mylar balloon.