My Body is a Garden that I get Lost in

Abstract

For my senior project, I am growing a garden into a mold of myself. To do this I am planting lettuce, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, swiss chard, and kale into a two-part, full-body cast. The roots will take on the shape of the mold once the garden has matured. My intention with this project is to investigate our relationship to non-human life to understand our state of separation and dominance over the natural world. I question how human-centric ideas of hierarchy, competition, and categorization form our understanding of nature. I take inspiration from the words symbiosis, hybridity, umwelt, and holobiont as a means to consider the personhood of nonhuman life to tell new stories of coexistence. I work with the concept of anthropomorphism to combine our sensorial experience with nonhuman life. I do this carefully so that our perspectives may intersect to elevate the lived experience of more than just human life. In merging my form with plant life I do not want to overshadow the other by attributing our species traits onto it. I recognize that plants' bodies and lives are vastly different from our own.