My current work investigates whether plant life has the capacity to act as an artistic medium. Microgreens, hydroponic gardening, indoor farming and ceramic installations create a visual language that invite plants and garden systems into the gallery. Because of plant life’s significant aesthetic potential and it’s historical and contemporary connection to the ceramic medium, I fold my garden practice it into my artistic pursuits Food-based plants offer distinct formal qualities like color, shape and texture, similar to those of more traditional artistic mediums. But over time, through their life cycles, plants change their installations. By the piece including seed and plant development, the installations germinate, flourish, die and are eaten, creating a visceral viewing experience. Purple cabbage, fuchsia chard, and deep green tatsoi produce brilliant color palates, and are all formal qualities in the works. Green and purple mustard mixes offer a myriad of complex shapes that when grown as microgreens in terracotta trays, generate planes of vibrant and contrasting colors. Diverse plant life in combination with ceramic hues produces a visually rich experience and transforms the gallery space into a living and breathing environment.

The re-contextualization of a garden practice to a gallery space engages viewers by offering them a new site for food production and an alternative medium by which art can be made and viewed. By exhibiting the successes and failures of a food growth practice within a gallery context, my work legitimizes the use of plants as an artistic medium and exhibits gardens in a literal way, rather than traditional idealized representations.