Instagram, @mileycyrus.

The Disney-darling-turned-family-values’-worst-nightmare debuted a collection of sculptures Wednesday at fashion designer (and close personal friend) Jeremy Scott’s Spring 2015 show. The pieces, which are basically glued-together hunks of technicolor trash, are exactly what you’d expect from Cyrus at this point: spastic, playful and unapologetically tactless.

The pieces appear to be a culmination of this summer’s pot-fueled creative high. Those who follow Cyrus on Instagram are already familiar with her current process: she hoards brightly colored plastic like a seagull on crack, combining pieces of trash, little toys and gifts from fans into carefully arranged clusters. 

Most of the pieces in the collection, which Cyrus calls “Dirty Hippie,” are a wink at activities Hannah Montana was expressly forbidden from doing. One resembles a five-foot-tall bong. Another one is “a vibrator, which I got from a fan,” explained Cyrus to V Magazine. “And that’s a joint [attached to it], so that’s the vibe.” 

Some pieces are standalone sculptures, while others are meant to be worn. Scott and Cyrus displayed the line of accessories-cum-artworks alongside the runway as well as on the models themselves. The jewelry is plastic fantastic: jubilant strings of multicolored beads accented with various doodads. Cyrus’ necklace included, among other things, a blunt and pine-scented air freshener. The tone is joyously juvenile.

Instagram, @mileycyrus.

Psychologists have suggested that child stars stop maturing emotionally when they reach a certain level of fame. Justin Bieber’s development, for instance, would then have been stunted around the age of thirteen. The theory would explain why he likes egging houses. 

You could say that Cyrus’ latest production is a careless, crude middle finger to the art world. But you could also read a certain wistfulness into the clusters of little toys, toys that a Hannah Montana-era Cyrus might have stuck in her desk drawer. Perhaps they’re not meaningless hunks of crap; rather, they’re hunks of crap through which Cyrus is mourning the loss of her youth. Could it be that she regrets giving up her childhood to be an icon of ours?

Instagram, @mileycyrus.

The sculptures Cyrus debuted on Wednesday play with the relationship between childhood and the forbidden. To someone who’s watched her go through the trauma of superstardom, the sculptures seem to represent the fragmentation of her own identity into pre- and post- Disney innocence. 

While Cyrus’ connection to the pieces of junk may be nostalgic, it’s not bitter. “This seems so fucking lame to say but I feel like my art became kind of a metaphor—an example of my life,” she explains. “Because a bunch of shitty things kept happening…Everything just kept shitting on me and shitting on me. So then I started taking all of those shit things and making them good, and being like, I’m using it.” 

Cyrus’ piles of shit are sad, in a way, but they also convey an unmistakable joyfulness. They represent the conflicting feelings that Cyrus must feel about growing up, the confusion that came from simultaneously being robbed of a childhood and experiencing it through an image of herself on TV.

Maybe she’s not making this type of art to mourn, but rather to heal. Maybe submerging herself in the paraphernalia of childhood—not just through these sculptures, but through the entire Miley Cyrus act—is a cathartic part of her transition into real adulthood.

Her self-prescribed art therapy seems to be working. “This is me doing something,” she says regarding her burst of productivity. “I love it…this is giving me happiness, so that’s all I have to focus on.”

“Dirty Hippie” is currently on display at the V Magazine gallery in New York.