In April 2023 I participated in a group show at a local Detroit gallery, Alley Culture, alongside four friends and fellow artists; Megan Diviney, Aisling Arrington, Carolyn Catlos, and Andie Mellon. Our group show, “Threshold” was focused on the transition of Winter to Spring, a tribute to the recent equinox and the transition of Alley Culture to new hands after the passing of its founders Mick Vranich and Sherry Hendrick.

This installation, entitled “Melding”, combines the love I have for plants, horticulture, and ethnobotany with that of my work as an event floral designer. A combination of the feeling of calmly resting in a meadow and the mesmerizing over stimulation of a Movement Festival after party.  All of the plant materials used in this installation are ones that I harvested and foraged from various local places. Some are cultivated, some are wild, some native, others invasive. I love learning about all plants, but there’s something special about getting to know  the plants of my home. To learn the name of the weed that you always see along the highway or that weird looking one in the crack of the sidewalk. To learn that this plant in the backyard has great medicinal uses, that tree is hermaphroditic, and that flower has a symbiotic relationship with ants – I love those details. So I chose to feature plants of our home and share them in their winter form, some very different from how they look other times of year.

Representative of the threshold between Winter and Spring, all of the plant decor in this installation is dead and dried except for a few small spring bulbs sprouting from the ground. But much of the dried plant material are pods containing seeds for future growth. Green light, illuminating from hidden places, displays the life stored beneath the Earth, preparing to blossom with the warming of the new season. The two chairs at the center of the installation invite the viewer to cross the threshold into the artwork and be enveloped in it, to become a part of it.

Photos by: It Clicks Photo and Mark McClelland