Ceramics Artist Statment

Kayla Reid

Artist Statement

My work focuses on plants as conscious living beings. Through research I have discovered that plants can have awareness of their surroundings, recognizing plants that are next to them or other organisms that interact with them. In another article I found research that said that when related plants such as parents or siblings are planted to gather in a pot, their roots do not grow as deep therefore they do not compete with one another whereas they would if the plants were unrelated. This study shows that plants emphasize and recognize their families just as a human would their own. If trees are living beings then is it right to mass murder them through means of clear cutting and desertification? Trees and plants are more complex beings then people acknowledge them to be because people assume that they are not like humans because they do not display emotion, talk, or communicate with us. People need plants for things like wood, food, and housing therefor people only see plants as a resource for man’s needs rather than similar beings.

One of my pieces focuses on the specific scientific discovery that trees are able to communicate with each other using their root systems by releasing chemical symbols. I use human lips symbolizing how people use their lips to communicate with one another. In another piece, I give human characteristics to trees. Using scale, I identify the big tree as parent and the cut stump as an offspring. The cut tree has faces of tree stumps with sad faces to further emphasize that plants have feelings as well. The larger tree has an angry face on it to show that the parent tree is angry that its offspring was cut down just as a person would be mad if someone harmed their family members especially by murdering them. The larger tree is angry that people are violently sawing down its family, friends, forest, and community while the cut tree is telling the larger tree how upset it is by using imagery of saws cutting trees and faces on the cut logs of trees. My final piece shows imagery of cut forests and stacked logs to question the tree stumps are like the remnants of something that was once living, like a grave marker in a cemetery. A clear-cut forest is like a cemetery, only the remains of what was living.